When a company develops a widely adopted and used open-source tool (anything from a Ruby gem to a framework such as DEV) what advice do you give them when they are looking to monetize it? Is there a "usual" path you like to take or is it very dependant on the technology and what it does?
Thanks for taking the time to do this amongst all the chaos!!!
Hi Molly! Commercializing an open-source tool is definitely a hotly debated topic with lots of opinions =). There isn't a "usual" path per se because it does depend a lot on the technology. It also depends on whether the team wants to build venture-backed, high-growth business (e.g. Hashicorp, Elastic, Confluent), or a more bootstrapped, long-scale model (e.g. JetBrains).
That said, I do have some opinions on this from my past experiences, some of which I elaborated on in my presentation at the Open Core Summit on "Putting the Product in Product-Led GTM". I'll summarize some of my thoughts below:
Develop a "critical path" value proposition, for your community user, effectively one that is so important that it gets the open-source adopted into the core workflows and architecture, and "designed-in" as the process of record for every team in both communities and enterprises alike.
Understand what your enterprise buyer actually values (usually some combination of piece-of-mind, collaboration, and performance). Influence them to provide the enterprise version of your product as a service to their users as an upsell.
Make the upsell as frictionless as possible--use an inside sales process that takes advantage of the bottoms-up nature of your product, and architecturally either use hosted SaaS or don't force your customers to swap out binaries to upgrade.
Create a balanced product/engineering team culture. Don't put a firewall between your community and commercial teams; your product and engineering folks should have empathy for both sets of users and buyers.
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When a company develops a widely adopted and used open-source tool (anything from a Ruby gem to a framework such as DEV) what advice do you give them when they are looking to monetize it? Is there a "usual" path you like to take or is it very dependant on the technology and what it does?
Thanks for taking the time to do this amongst all the chaos!!!
Hi Molly! Commercializing an open-source tool is definitely a hotly debated topic with lots of opinions =). There isn't a "usual" path per se because it does depend a lot on the technology. It also depends on whether the team wants to build venture-backed, high-growth business (e.g. Hashicorp, Elastic, Confluent), or a more bootstrapped, long-scale model (e.g. JetBrains).
That said, I do have some opinions on this from my past experiences, some of which I elaborated on in my presentation at the Open Core Summit on "Putting the Product in Product-Led GTM". I'll summarize some of my thoughts below: