Should you worry about AWS eating your lunch?

Are you worried that one of the big cloud providers will rip off your open source project and launch a product made up largely of your project?

It’s something a lot of open source founders worry about at some point, and not without reason. Here are some ways to ease the worry:

• Focus your monetization efforts on an enterprise edition that’s deployed on-prem. AWS isn’t in the enterprise on-prem software business, so they won’t eat your lunch if you do this — especially if you focus on the customers who need the software to be on-prem, in other words, those who for some reason can not use a cloud hosted version.

• Have a tight niche. Especially when you’re small, you don’t need to land tons of customers. Most startups are looking for 10-20 customers in the next year. If you go after a market that’s small, well-defined and has needs you meet better than anyone, AWS probably won’t find it worth it to try to compete with you.

• Build an active, loyal community. If your community of open source users are more true believers than opportunists, your community will become a ‘moat’ to protect you if AWS tries to compete. They will advocate for you in their workplaces, on social media and other forums.

• Deliver some value that AWS can’t. AWS is known for being complex and for locking people in, for example. If you have a cloud version that explicitly is not either of those things, you’ll always be able to differentiate with AWS.

• If a cloud provider does try to copy you, stay calm and differentiate! There will still be something you do better. Figure out what it is and broadcast the message widely.

I’ve talked to enough open source startup founders who thought, in retrospect, that they made poor decisions because of fear that AWS (or some other cloud provider) would rip them off to think that while you should be aware of the potential competition from cloud provider services, you also shouldn’t live in constant fear.