Is your Open Source Project your Main Competitor?

It’s not necessarily bad if your open source project is your main competitor — as long as you’re happy with the number of people who choose the paid version. If sales are booming, don’t fix what isn’t broken.

However, if your OSS is your main competitor and sales are not booming… you need to make sure you, your team and the ecosystem you play in is clear about the difference in ideal user / ideal customer profile between the two and the USP for project versus the USP for the product.

You need to know what the difference is between someone who uses the open source project and someone who should pay for the commercial product. If you do not know what that difference is, fix that now. And if you know, but suspect your team doesn’t, fix that now.

NOTE: you should also be able to articulate who would not only be satisfied with the pure open source version, but is actually better served by the open source version than they would be by the paid version.

Once you clearly understand who the commercial offering is for and who the OSS is for, 1) you’ll stop laying awake at night thinking about how your OSS is killing your sales prospects, and 2) you’ll actually improve your sales numbers, because you’ll start targeting the right people and telling those people the right story.