Perfection doesn’t give you an advantage if your competitors spent years building an open source community

To kick off our Open Source Growth Guidebook interview series, we had a great discussion with Norbert Sendetzky from Aimeos PHP E-Commerce Framework, an eCommerce solution that lets you easily create a webshop, online store, or marketplace.

Here are some of his insights about their open source growth success:

• 🧐 Open source projects aren’t things that go viral. Optimizing your page for search engines (SEO) is usually much cheaper.
• 😍 Developers who are enthusiastic about an open source product can convince their peers much easier to try the project than by marketing.
• 📢 Release early! Perfection doesn’t give you an advantage if your competitors had several years for building a community in the meantime.
• ➕ Open source projects have an advantage over closed source projects because it’s easier to convince people to try your product, if they can start without spending money.
• 🚀 If you don’t have big budgets for marketing and sales, releasing software as open source is extremely important to gain popularity and market share.