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Dean McPherson
Dean McPherson

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[open sourcing q] We're taking on Zapier, Make and n8n with no funding, and a small team

You might say we're suckers for punishment, but we're working on an AI native workflow automation product with a small team, no funding and no intention of raising.

I'm Dean, and I bootstrapped the online form builder Paperform from nothing to 4M ARR with my wife Diony without a drop of external funding. Our team is now working on something even more ambitious - we've just launched Stepper (https://stepper.io) - our take on an automation platform, built for AI.

The biggest roadblock we have is building third party app integrations - one idea we have to solve this is to commercially open-source all our third party app integrations, along with our app spec, and encourage the community to build, extend and improve the apps.

Has anyone had experience with utilising open sourcing + bounties to outsource discreet units of work like this?

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