Product-led growth and open source startups

Last month, I gave a talk about product led growth for open source projects. In many ways, I think open source projects are the original examples product-led growth. Before there were PLG handbooks and experts talking about activation rates and free trial conversions, open source projects were out there growing without the benefit of a sales teams.

Open source startups often — perhaps even always — see themselves as product led growth companies. Which is fine, but there are some things to remember.

• An open source project is fundamentally different from either a free trial or a free tier

• The audience for an open source project and commercial product usually diverges more than the audience for a SaaS company’s free tier and paid tier

• People expect to be sold to when they sign up for a free tier. We all know that’s the game we’re playing — free tier users know they are leads. Treating open source users like leads is a great way to piss off the open source community and make sure they not only never buy anything, but also stop using your project.

So how is this actionable? My recommendation is to apply the principles of PLG to your open source project, but not necessarily to the relationship between your OSS and your commercial offering. If you have a hosted SaaS, you might even have a free trial, in which case you can apply PLG to your cloud offering just like any other SaaS company would — but it wouldn’t make sense to look at your open source project user base and expect a conversion rate to paid SaaS that’s anywhere near what you’d expect from a free trial or even free tier conversion. And whatever you do, don’t treat your open source users like leads.