Positioning an Open Source Project and Enterprise Version

Founders who are building a company around an open source project have a unique challenge when it comes to positioning. First of all, they need to position two products: The open source project itself and the product or service that the company is using to monetize that project. 

How to approach positioning also depends on what type of open source business model the company is pursuing and the relationship between the project and the commercial offering. In this blog post, I’ll talk about positioning when there’s an enterprise version and an open source version — ie, the commercial offering is very closely tied to the open source project. 

In subsequent posts, I’ll talk about other ways to approach positioning when your business model is different. For example, when you have an open source project plus a cloud service / SaaS offering, when the commercial offering is support for the OS project or when the open source project is a component of the commercial offering but has much narrower functionality. 

Positioning the open source project

If you’re building a business around an open source project, building a strong contributor community is critical to long-term success. This is true even though the persona for an OSS user or contributor is likely not the same as the buyer persona for the commercial offering. When the enterprise buyer does evaluate the commercial product, he or she will almost certainly check to see how active the open source project’s community is as a form of due diligence. 

First of all, position the open source project for the people who will use and contribute to the open source project, not for the target buyers for the commercial offering. The two are different products. You’ll get the most traction if you position the open source project for the type of people who are most likely to get value out of it. 

How should you do that? Here are the steps I recommend: 

  • Identify your top 5 contributors (other than those inside your company)

  • Reach out to those contributors and find out what they use the project for and what they would do if the project didn’t exist

  • Identify common traits among the responses, and among the top contributors. What are the similarities? What words to they use to describe what they are trying to accomplish by using the project?

  • Use the information you get to draft a mission statement that focuses on the problem your top contributors wanted to solve and how your project solves it

  • Don’t stop there: choose how to do outreach, what events to speak at, how the project should evolve based on what your top contributors identified as the problems they are trying to solve with your project.

The open source project should have its own marketing plan, its own positioning statement and its own messaging strategy, all targeted based on the information you got from talking with contributors. 

Positioning the enterprise offering

Your buyer for the enterprise version will not be the same as the contributor profile. He or she will generally have different requirements, often around:

  • Support contracts

  • User interface

  • Reliability SLOs

It’s important to take a minute and think about what the buyer for an enterprise product would do if your open source project did not have an enterprise version. In most cases, “use the open source version” is likely not one of the competitive alternatives they would consider. Many enterprises have rules that make open source projects more like shadow IT, not something that the official buyer would endorse. So you need to undertake a positioning exercise that is specific to your enterprise offering, evaluating things like:

  • Competitive alternatives

  • Unique value compared to those alternatives

  • Types of organizations and buyer personas who will see the most value in the offering

The answers to these questions will be different for the open source project and the enterprise offering, which means that your positioning should be different for the OS project and the enterprise version. As a result of the different positioning, your messaging and marketing strategy should also be different. 


If you position your enterprise version as ‘Project Name with Fancy UI,’ you’re missing an opportunity to talk about the different problems that enterprise buyers face. You’re missing an opportunity to focus your marketing and sales efforts on the type of people who are willing to pay money to use the your product. 

By the way, if you’re having trouble positioning either the open source project or the enterprise version, that’s something I can help with.


 


Emily Omier