What's your point of view?
Chances are, if you’ve decided to found a company you have some pretty strong opinions. These might be opinions about how software should be architected, about what underlying technology should be used (and what is actually garbage) and/or about the role that software should play in people’s lives.
Chances are, some people disagree with you.
Disagreements can be pretty uncomfortable. There are certainly situations when skirting around disagreement is a best practice. But when you’re talking about your product or open source project is not the time to soften or hide your strong opinions (as relevant to your product, of course).
I recently interviewed some of the folks behind OpenTelemetry for Cloud Native Startup, and I was struck by how front-and-center the project puts it’s mission and vision. That vision includes a strong point of view about the role of telemetry both to observability and to the health of the overall software. It’s memorable. In their case, it’s also fairly hard to disagree with, but important anyway — because few other people are taking the time to acknowledge how important telemetry is.
Be memorable
The first advantage of a strong opinion is that it’s memorable, especially if it’s contrarian. If you’re the person saying that CI will be irrelevant in 3 years, people pay attention to that. If you’re a security vendor who constantly reminds people not to solve security by buying yet another tool, that’s memorable, too. Opinions are memorable. When someone hears you on a podcast, reads a contributed article in The New Stack or happens upon your website, you want them to remember your point of view long enough to become curious about how your product supports that point of view.
Some people will agree (others won’t)
When we voice an opinion, there’s always the fear that some people will disagree with us. That can be uncomfortable, though generally voicing opinions about technical matters won’t lead to shouting matches (usually).
No matter how contrarian your opinion, there will be some people who agree with you. If you’re smart about it, you’ll look for opportunities to speak to precisely the type of people who are likely to agree. If you say something like “developers should be able to see how their work impacts users’ privacy,” someone who agrees with you is likely to remember and see how the product or project relates.
There’s a flip side: Some people will not agree. This is ok and something you just need to accept. You’re not going to have 100% market saturation — nobody does. When you voice a clear opinion, though, people who don’t agree — people who never would have loved your project or product in the first place — can see that and they move along without wasting your time. This is also a good outcome for everyone.
It attracts attention
So far, I’ve been talking about how potential users and potential customers react to strong opinions. But they’re not the only people who matter. A strong point of view attracts attention from investors, from journalists, from analysts, from conference organizers. They want to understand why you hold that opinion. But just as importantly, a point of view signals that you are not like everyone else, and that is interesting.
The bottom line is that a point of view is a key part of differentiating yourself, your company and product, open source or commericial, from everyone else. It’s a way to attract like-mined folks who are likely to love your company and want to become part of your community while also repelling those who disagree and wouldn’t be happy with the product anyway.
One of the most common complaints I hear from founders is that no one is talking about their company. Having a strong stance related to your product is part of solving that.