Is your OSS a growth machine, part 2

I promised to write more about this yesterday, and then got distracted. Let’s dive in now.

Last week I wrote about some of the basics you need to have in place in order to even evaluate whether or not your OSS is driving revenue growth. But if you have those in place, what should you be evaluating?

Intentional communication

If you have a revenue model that requires customers to interact with a human before they pay you, this is easy: Whoever that human is (a founder, until about $1million ARR, a salesperson after that) should find out how the existence of the open source project influenced the customer’s buying decision. Sometimes the customer will tell you, sometimes you have to ask. Regardless, find out and make sure you’re tracking what people are saying.

Growth trajectories

Does your revenue growth more or less follow the same trajectory as your open source project’s growth? If so, they’re probably connected. If your open source project has wild growth and your revenue growth is meh, or your open source project is stagnant and your revenue is exploding, it’s likely that your open source project isn’t the primary driver of revenue growth.

So what if it turns out that your open source project is not a driver of revenue growth? Does that mean you should abandon the project?

Not necessarily. You should always understand what value your open source project provides to your company, and how it fits into your commercial strategy. If you thought it was driving growth but it’s not, that is important information. But are there other ways it helps? Do deals close faster because of the project, not because they discovered you through your project but because it means security reviews are faster? Do you get better feedback on your product as a result? Is your fundamental point of view that the type of software you create should be open source?

Or, of course, you should change something about your open source project or, more likely, about your commercial offering (either how either or both are positioned, or actually change something about the offering), so that the OSS does drive growth. Either way, if your OSS is not driving revenue growth, you should be aware of that fact.