Product-led growth for open source projects

Quick TDLR: I’ll be at Open Source Summit in Vancouver BC this Wednesday and Thursday. If you’re at the event and want to connect, let me know or come to my talk about product led growth and open source project on Wednesday at 2:05.

Product-led growth is a big buzzword in the commercial developer tools space (and, honestly, everywhere in software). It’s more or less another way to express that you have a bottoms-up, user-focused sales motion.

Open source projects — and I’m talking here about the open source project, not any attached commercial offering — are an obvious fit for a product-led growth strategy. That’s because:

  • You’re focused on individual users (there are no buyers)

  • You want the project use to expand through minimal direct outreach on the maintainers’ part

  • You hope the project can “land and expand” all by itself

When I list out those things, I always think “product-led growth” sounds a bit like the field of dreams. Here’s where the nuance comes in: companies that are successful at product-led growth put a lot of effort into it (and also often get lucky, too). And many open source maintainers under-invest in the things that make product-led growth likely to take off.

So what specifically should open source maintainers do to rev up their project-led growth engine?

  • Make the user experience awesome. This is something open source projects are not known for; but good user experience is a pillar of product-led growth strategies.

  • Deliver value quickly. If your users have to spend 2 hours setting up and configuring your project before it delivers value, that is a product-led growth fail. Onboarding should be easy.

  • Deliver an ‘aha’ moment. PLG people like to talk about ‘activation,’ which basically means the first ‘aha’ moment a user gets. The key is, you want to deliver something magical. And you want to make sure that at least 40% of people who download the project experience the magic. In PLG, the magic moment is called “activation.”

  • Have excellent docs. You want people to be able to self-serve, which means getting as many questions answered as possible without interacting with a human. That means good docs.

  • Great support. An active community that actually responds to questions is important to project-led growth. At the beginning, that probably means you, the maintainer, being super active.

Companies that are serious about product-led growth do a lot of measuring, testing and iteration. If you’re serious about project-led growth, you should make sure you have access to as much metrics about how users interact with your project as possible, and you should do a lot of user interviews to keep your feedback loop short. You should iterate, and track how the changes you make to your website, your docs and your software affect adoption, activation and engagement.

I’ll be talking more about the subject on Wednesday, so hope to see you there, or at the conference in general!

Emily Omier