What about PLG for commercial open source?

Yesterday I wrote about product-led growth and why it’s the natural strategy for almost all open source projects. I’m also doing a talk on the talk tomorrow at Open Source Summit.

I’ve also heard people say things like, “we’re an open source startup, so of course our growth strategy is bottoms-up.” And that, I think, is incorrect.

Open source startups need to worry about two things: Growth of their project and growth of their revenue-producing product. Growth of the free open source software will nearly always follow the product-led blueprint. But I am not a fan of the ‘our open source project is a lead funnel’ approach. Leads can come from your open source project, but if you’re serious about increasing your revenue and working towards profitability, you need a growth strategy that is specifically focused on your commercial product.

That growth strategy might be product-led — especially if your commercial product is a hosted SaaS. But if your commercial product is a version of your open source software that has functionality for teams, managers and/or executives (and this is a pretty common monetization strategy), you might be selling to customers who expected a high-touch, sales-led process and who are going to be paying you six figures per year. If that’s the case, it would be foolish to assume you’ll be successful with product-led growth just because you’re an open source company.