Focus on your market, and make it narrow
Focus is important for all companies; it’s even more important for open source companies. Here’s why:
Open source companies already have two products: the project and the commercial offering. They are spread thinner than companies at a similar stage that don’t have a project to maintain.
They have to understand the overlap and the delta between the market, and the needs/wants of the market, for the commercial offering versus the open source project.
They have less ability to iterate on their business model, assuming they’ve already committed to the open source approach.
Their product roadmaps are much more complex than a straight proprietary software company, because they have to decide what goes into open source and what goes into proprietary, and they have to make those decisions sooner in the company’s trajectory.
They don’t have loads of information about the behaviors of open source users, and have to deliberately seek out information about how open source users actually behave.
Having an intentional positioning strategy will make it easier to make product decisions, will make it clear how the markets for product and project relate to each other, and will make it possible to have a sales conversation in which you don’t get stuck when someone asks why they should pay for a software they could get for free. It’s never to early to think about positioning, but they time when an open source company should get really serious about the positioning is when it’s ready to roll out a commercial product and really needs to understand the interplay between product and project.