I don't care about your GitHub stars

I’ve recently seen a handful of open source companies writing tutorials on how to get a boatload of GitHub stars in a short amount of time. These posts always intrigue me a little bit, mostly because I can’t understand how they bring value to the company’s core audience. If you make a project management tool, the pain point your customers come to you to solve is not their inability to get GitHub stars, it’s the fact that they hate Jira. (Positioning note: I’ve never heard anyone talk about how much they love Jira, so positioning as ‘an open source alternative to Jira’ reads to me like ‘an open source version of the software you know and hate.’ Is there not something else awesome about the project you could highlight?) So why are you wasting your time writing blog posts to impress your peers, rather than to wow your potential customers?

Anyway, I get why people like GitHub stars. I like getting likes on my LinkedIn posts. But when I talk to other consultants, I don’t boast about my LinkedIn likes. I boast about my revenue, or my pipeline, or the fact that I’m keynoting at a conference or something like that.

Here’s another thing: I have never heard a bootstrapped founder, or a series C company, going on and on about GitHub stars. I only seem to see pre-revenue companies doing so. I think this is because once you start monetizing, you realize that the relationship between stars and $$ is, while not nonexistent, fairly weak. And you realize that building a serious business is harder to game than getting GitHub stars.

If you’re serious about building a sustainable business, make sure you’re measuring the stuff that matters: Your sales pipeline, your ARR, your net promoter score, the feedback you’re getting from users and from customers. If you can see a straight line from more GitHub stars to more closed deals, for sure, measure those GitHub stars. But most companies can’t, which is why most companies are not well served by obsessing about stars.