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Building an open-source company in public

Tomer Barnea on July 06, 2022

One of the main core values of Novu is transparency with our community, team members, partners, and the industry around us. Transparency isn’t som...
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Phil Ashby

Really interesting approach, and one that seems to work for some organisations - I have one question though: what are your investors expecting in return for their money & time, and what plans have they seen that provide confidence they will get it?

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Tomer Barnea

That is a good question Phil, first thing first Novu is a COSS (commercial open source software), so we do plan to monetize parts of our offering, and we are going to learn what would be the best to do so while keep on working with our community. So the simple answer to this question is thy plan to see money in return for their money & time. Now about the plans, Dima and I are working together as entrepreneurs for the past 9 years, so a good connection is a safe assumption, this is one of the biggest issues for companies. Other this statement they have seen our Open Source library adoption at the time around 2K stars and a couple of hundreds people talking to us, as well as a 2 years business plan, investors deck, and a the advisors who are working with us.

Is that helpful?

If this might interest you, you can check the deck on our handbook handbook-novu.super.site/open-star...

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T "@tnir" N

GitLab No.1 community developer as a Core team member of it here. πŸ‘‹ Amazing product! I just missed github.com/novuhq/novu in the text 😭

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Tomer Barnea

Hey Hey, Nice to meet you :)

What do you mean? Why are we on Github vs Gitlab? :) If so, let's jump on a call :)

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T "@tnir" N

No, I just meant you did not put the URL for your open-source repo and why not? πŸ€”

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Tomer Barnea

Oh no, you are right😱, I'll add that, thanks! Regardless, I am happy to meet :)

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T "@tnir" N • Edited

Nice to meet you too, @combarnea!

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Gonçalo Rodrigues

Oh wow! We have thought about doing this, but haven't pulled the trigger yet. We are open source and have our roadmap public - but we don't have our Notion pages public and we use Slack.

Do you use your public discord channel as the main channel for internal discussions or do you still use a private channel? I can imagine there's always things you don't want to share too soon.

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Tomer Barnea

Hey Gonçalo!

That is a great question! So the answer is, it depends on the topic, our product, engineering discussions are all on public channels, but as a company we have other topic like team meetings, happy hours, business related subjects that are talked over private channels over at Discord. It took us some time to get where we are, and I am fairly happy with the situation, with that in mind we still update our Discord channels and try and mitigate internal discussions if those can be done publicly. You can ask more about that @iampearceman as he leads the community and Discord efforts.

Hopefully this can help you :)

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Murtuzaali Surti

Open Source FTW πŸš€

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Tomer Barnea

πŸš€

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Emil Pearce

I really like the Emil guy..

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Tomer Barnea

He is pretty popular nowdays ❀️

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Gamerseo

It might be a good idea.

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Tomer Barnea

Thank you, Gamerseo πŸš€