Risks, Real and Perceived
There’s a lot of talk about risk taking in the startup world. That’s because a lot of the things you do as a startup founder, or even as an open source maintainer, feel risky.
You’re doing something different and it might not work out.
You’re putting your work out there in the open, and anyone can see your mistakes.
Almost by definition you’ll make some mistakes, some of them kind of public and probably humiliating. You’ll release a feature that sucks, you’ll put out a blog post full of typos, you’ll say something stupid on a podcast episode. You’ll lose customers. You’ll have open source users rip you apart on Twitter. There’s a good argument to be made that if none of those things ever happen to you, you’re not playing the game right.
You have to put forth this incredibly grandiose vision to investors, then deal with a reality of the sharp post-launch spike in users, then a sharp drop and a slow, slow creep upwards (hopefully) in users/revenue. Or worse, a slow creep downwards. Holding those two things in your head at the same time is rough, and it will feel risky.
However, the chances of something really bad happening to you or to someone you love because your product was crap or the whole endeavor went under is really quite low.
Let me quickly define ‘really bad’ for you:
Somebody dies
You and your kids are sleeping on the streets / don’t have enough food
… I think that’s about the list.
Now, there are some situations where someone could die because your product sucks. It just probably won’t be you, or at least it’s not more likely to be you than anyone else. If your open source project and/or your commercial product is used in safety-critical systems, I would absolutely lose sleep about making sure that product is impeccable.
So what’s my point? It’s to acknowledge that a lot of the things you do in building an open source company feel really terrifying, but at the end of the day your startup’s commercial failure is not likely to result in something really, really bad happening to you. Just keep that in mind when things are tough. But if you’re losing sleep about whether or not your product will cause a train derailment or something, that’s probably a good thing.