The Open Source Mind Game

One of the takeaways from talking with hundreds of founders, operators and investors on my podcast, for my column on entrepreneurship and, of course, as part of my consulting work is that building a company is a mind game… it requires balls of steel. And building an open source company is even more of a mind game… it requires balls of titanium.

I’ll get into why in a second, and also how you can make the open source game a little easier, mentally. But another particularity of open source companies is that they can be a mindfuck not just for the founders, but also for the sales and marketing team, especially if those sales and marketing teams have experience with proprietary companies but not open source companies.

Why?

If you’re building an open source company, you have to be ok with:

  • Loads of people using your technology for free, including loads of people who work for big companies with fat budgets.

  • Losing sales deals to your open source project.

  • The fact that some people aren’t just satisfied with your OSS, they are actually better off with it than they would be with your paid thing, and not just because they are broke.

  • The 0.5% of the open source community that are trolls, and will tell you that there’s a picture on your website that isn’t Creative Commons licensed and therefore you’re not really an open source company. Or worse.

  • Internal tension (as in, inside yourself as well as inside your team) about how to be a good open source community member and how to make a profit, and how to allocate scarce resources between project and product.

All of the above impact not just founders, who are dealing with the mind games inherent in building a company already (what happens if we fail? Oh shit, now I am responsible for 40 mortgages! Our biggest customer just left and I don’t know why… Ugh I have to fire someone… and more), but also the rest of the team.

Sales people can find # 1 and # 2 super stressful, if they don’t have an open source background… and while ideally your whole GTM team will have open source experience, the reality is that not tons of people have that experience, so the people you can hire for GTM roles might not.

How do you win the mind game?

Aside from white knuckling it, there’s some things you can do to make the mind game easier to bear, both for you and your team. Good news! Everything on this list will also help your company in more tangible ways than the founders’ and sales team’s mental health.

  • Make sure you have a very clear understanding of how your OSS is contributing business value to your company. So when you (or your team) have a bad moment, you can easily remember why it matters to take the open source route.

  • Have a very clear framework for the relationship between commercial offering and product. This means clear positioning for each, ICPs, unique value propositions, competitive alternatives and pain points are defined for project and product individually, so it’s easy to see where the delta is. You should have a core description of product and project that is different. This will make it obvious what features belong in each edition, and also make it easier to target marketing activities and qualify sales leads.

  • Make sure you get alignment on the relationship between project and product, as well as the overall positioning and point of view of the whole company. Writing your positioning and GTM fundamentals is critical to make this happen. Make sure your whole team is in the same feedback loop and working towards the same goals. This is especially important for your team’s mental health — it’s really easy to feel like you’re not going in the same direction when engineering is going on and on about GitHub stars and you’re the salesperson trying to meet a target.

In summary: Open source companies are more complex, and they can really be a mental challenge for everyone involved. Do what you can to minimize the complexities and mind games so you can get more benefits from your open source path.

Emily Omier