Last year was the first time I heard of an open-source startup as SaaS.
I didn’t even understand what it meant. How do you monetize such a thing?
E...
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Thank you @nevodavid for this very interesting and inspiring article. It's impressive how quickly the community has grown! As for myself, I am also developing a startup based on an open-source project. Please feel free to take a look and let me know what you think!
The project : github.com/Ikomia-dev/IkomiaApi
The website : ikomia.ai
It looks amazing and super complicated 🙈
Your feedback is of great interest to me because the impression you have is the opposite of the intended effect 😅 ! I would really like to know what you mean by 'super complicated.' Is it an issue with the presentation? Or is it because the topic of Computer Vision is technical? Or something else? Thank you !
Just because it's Computer Vision - it's for a more sophisticated persona.
Thank you @nevodavid for this, Great Article.
for those reason @ IDURAR we are building open source erp crm : github.com/idurar/idurar-erp-crm
This is awesome!
Hey @lalami ,
Cool project for sure. I would advise you run idurar-erp-crm through the privado.ai open source project as there are some potential leakages of sensitive data that it flagged.
Best of luck with the project!
Lyle
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I’ll read this some time it’s exactly a question I needed answers too!
You've hit the nail on the head! 🚀
Starting a new venture is like embarking on an epic quest, and open source is the magic elixir for startups. Here's why:
Cost Efficiency: Open source tools and libraries save startups precious resources. It's like having a treasure trove of software without the dragon-sized licensing fees.
Community Magic: Open source projects thrive on collaboration. Tap into the wisdom of the crowd and build upon battle-tested code. It's like having a fellowship of developers at your side.
Innovation Accelerator: With open source, you stand on the shoulders of giants. Leverage existing projects and focus on what makes your startup unique. It's like wielding a legendary sword!
Transparency & Trust: Open source fosters trust. Your users can see exactly what's under the hood. It's like a transparent knight in shining armor.
So, here's to the brave startups wielding the open-source Excalibur! 🗡️
Cheers to innovation, collaboration, and the journey ahead!
Thank you @nevodavid for this article, it's truly inspiring. You just provided me with valuable insights for a product my team and I are developing. Open source remains undefeated!
This is something I've been wishing to see a lot more from companies. What I've usually seen is a desire to open-source certain parts and leave other parts closed for fear of IP theft (more so for bigger companies).
I'm a believer that a good product won't go far without a great team and great culture, things that are a much harder to copy.
What do you think about startups who fear investors will see their startup as a liability if their code is freely available? I even heard the project would not get funded if a developer worked on it without paid contract, fearing they could come and claim a portion of equity later on. When I was working with startups back in the 2010s that was what founders were saying around me, not sure what the landscape looks like today.
Hi Freddy!
In general, I think that Brand and marketing > any product.
So it doesn't matter how many people will copy Novu, they will always be one step before us.
The only real fear is from big tech companies (Such as Google) to take your product.
That happend before with companies like Elastic Search.
I would usually put everything outside in the open, everybody can use it.
I would also work on closed-sourced on more enterprise based features such as SSO, Multi Tenancy, and so on.
It's really product dependent, we can see examples where Hashicorp, Docker and Mongodb changed their licence.
But if you just starting out (1st, 2nd year), there is no reason no to open-source.
Also all this "Stealth" startup is a dead method.
Everybody today build in public.
That's a good point, I'm leaning towards that way of thinking as well. Thanks for the reply!
Thank you for saying it out loud, Nevo!
Agree 100%
😻
I love open source but I think we fixate on GitHub stars too much. Contributions, forks, issues opened, plugins created, blog posts written would be a better metric - of course much more difficult to measure.
GitHub stars is a vanity metric that is easy to manage.
All the other ones are reflections of this metric.
If you have X amount of stars you will have ~Y amount of contributors.
I disagree with the correlation.
Stars measure attention, not usage.
Contributions are correlated with usage.
Attention is correlated with hype.
Sometimes they go hand in hand, sometimes they don't.
Thank you @nevodavid for sharing experience. It is useful to know what other OSS experience, because I hear different opinions. As usual, very useful article 👌
From my side, when I started areg project, I was not sure whether need to go to OSS or not. Then shortly understood that if you want to spread the technology, this is probably the best marketing that can work. Many people where telling me that I'll loose IP. But my agenda is not selling the technology, but the products serving the technology. I don't regret that went open source and you one more time confirmed this 😉
I would love to learn more from your experience.
Cheers 🍻
You will not lose IP :)
Here Novu is full open-sourced (MIT), we have paying customers, and we haven't lost any IP :)
Completely agree, especially when you clearly know what are the next steps. This was my answer 😉
I built an SaaS startup exclusively on Open Source. When my VC fund violated our contract, refused to pay me and my employers, we just took the code and started a new company 😁
Today 5 months later the original company is worthless and we're starting to make money. If it continues according to current projections, we'll have a Unicorn in 6 months 🥳
There's one born every minute 😂
ainiro.io
While I applaud those who see the opportunity to leverage open source within their business model, I respectfully disagree with the premise that all startups should make their products open source on several grounds:
Like many options in development and business, the OSS business model is just another tool in the toolbox that we've assembled over the course of our careers. We have to exercise good judgement to understand if it's the appropriate tool for the job and not treat every problem with a golden hammer.
As an alternative, I am very supportive of all businesses looking for ways to contribute back to the open source community. Many of us have developed quality solutions internally for mundane processes that provide no tangible market advantage for our products (beyond making the product higher quality); packaging these and pushing to public registries does help the overall ecosystem and helps build some brand awareness through the means mentioned in the article.
I may be late, but I want to join the discussion too, here are two project as my first step on the open source community. Both are on building state.
Good article!
This is our Open Source project: The Developer-Friendly TypeScript Framework for Server-Side Applications
Consider give us a ⭐ on GitHub: github.com/expressots/expressots
Here is the project site: expresso-ts.com/
Looks great!
I couldn't agree more with the idea that startups can benefit immensely from embracing open-source technologies. As a passionate advocate for open-source solutions, I've witnessed firsthand how it fosters innovation, reduces costs, and accelerates development.
At Coding Crafts, we firmly believe in the power of open source. As a leading Software Development Company in USA, we've integrated open-source technologies into our projects to deliver top-notch solutions for our clients. It's not just about cost-effectiveness; it's about tapping into a global community of developers, harnessing their expertise, and creating robust products that stand out in the market.
In fact, being recognized as the Best IT company in USA wouldn't have been possible without our commitment to open source. It has allowed us to stay agile, adapt to changing needs, and deliver high-quality software that transforms startups into industry leaders.
So, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that startups should build on open source. It's a strategic move that can set your company up for success, just as it has for us at Coding Crafts.
Love this article! We’ve been considering open-sourcing portions of Startup Wars so that other developers can use our startup based financial calculations.
Would anyone here find that useful? Such as equity calculations, tax calculations, HR, marketing, etc as an API.
Hi @nevodavid
Very interesting article and your growth looks quite impressive.
But I doubt a bit it's really repeatable and a lot of developers are ready to work on most projects.
Same as other people on comments, I'm builind and Open Source startup (azimutt.app - github.com/azimuttapp/azimutt), helping developers exploring their database schema, but despite having more than 1000 users and always great feddback, I don't really see contributions or even opened issues.
Do you have additional suggestion to foster this community?
Thanks!
We can all delves in closed source project,
And open-source where heart is.
How do you turn GitHub ⭐️ into 💵?
What’s your monetization strategy? You host it and ask for subscription?
Specfically for Novu - the cloud version and enterprise features are the ways we chose to monitize.
Really product dependent
Great article, Nevo. The value of code is getting negligibly small. Especially after the rise of LLM.
JUST WOW @nevodavid
😻
niceeee
60% agree with you @nevodavid