How to make your OSS drive revenue growth
What if you want your open source project to drive revenue growth, but after looking at your OSS and revenue growth trajectory and talking to users and customers, you’ve determined that is not happening at the moment?
Here are some options.
I have to say it: Do nothing and accept the situation. This is a bad option if your revenue is not growing as much as you want it to, but it is a good option if your revenue is going gangbusters and you’re profitable or have a clear path to profitability. If your revenue machine is not broken, do not fix it, and if something else that isn’t your OSS is driving revenue growth… that’s not a problem.
Re-evaluate the target market for your open source project versus your commercial offering. If you want your open source project to drive revenue growth, the ICPs of the OSS and the commercial product it should look like a Venn diagram. If it’s two circles that don’t touch, think about what you could change about either the OSS or the commercial product to bring the two together. If it’s two circles that overlap completely, this is also a problem, especially if your open source project is so good that maybe no one needs to buy the commercial offering.
Make sure there’s a cohesive story you’re telling about all of your company’s offerings. You have to position each offering separately, but make sure there’s a clear idea of what the overall company does and how the open source project and commercial offering relate to each other. Sometimes the open source project is treated so distantly from the company/commercial product that it’s no wonder it’s not driving growth.
Look at how you decide what is going to be on the OSS roadmap versus the commercial offering roadmap. Do you have a framework for making that decision? Going back to point 2, persona-based frameworks for what goes into a commercial offering are usually the best — you identify who your project and product is for, then make a decision about where features go based on whether or not it’s appropriate for that offering’s persona.
Even if your revenue growth isn’t gangbusters, it might turn out that it’s not because the relationship between your OSS and commercial offering is broken. Maybe you’re not investing in marketing/sales, and investing tons in the OSS. Maybe your commercial offering is still missing some really important features (SOC2 certification, SSO, etc — stuff that’s just table stakes for playing the enterprise software game). But if you suspect that your OSS should be driving more revenue growth than it is, see if the steps above help.