Why does community matter?
Last week, I wrote a bit about defining what you mean by open source community. This week, I want to take some time to unpack why (and if) community matters. The reason I want to discuss this is because people in the open source world generally assume that community is important — it is one of those underlying assumptions that rarely get revisited. With all the resources that companies, foundations and individuals invest to build community, we would all benefit by stepping back and reminding ourselves why community matters.
You can build a company without community
You probably do need a vibrant community to build a successful open source company, but you don’t need community to build a company. Many, in fact most, successful companies do not have any meaningful community. Examples of companies with strong communities — Fitbit, Harley Davidson, etc — are noteworthy because they are the exception. So building and maintaining a community is not a prerequisite for commercial success.
What are the benefits of community?
When people talk about community, they often cite these benefits of building community:
As a GTM motion to build excitement and promote bottoms up adoption
To inform product development and accelerate product market fit
As a way to nurture evangelists who will talk about your company / project
Cushion missteps: community-based companies have a more loyal following that are less likely to bail if the project or company makes some major misstep.
While these are genuine advantages, they are also not absolutely critical to company building. Some companies have a very top-down GTM motion — in fact, many people think that a product’s ultimate success depends more on how happy the CTO/CIO is than on how happy the ICs are.
Community building might not be the only (or primary) reason for being open source
While I think it’s generally true that following an open source startup path means building a community, I don’t think it’s the only reason to do so. Some other reasons might include:
Giving potential customers peace of mind (that they can access the code if you go out of business; that they can inspect the code themselves for security reasons, etc)
Allowing people to try before they buy, in a way that’s less pushy than a free trial
Do you need community?
While I think building a community can have major benefits, I think it matters less as the company matures and you start working with major customer who use your technology in production. When you’re powering a revenue-producing application, no one cares how many people come to your meetups or even how active your Slack is — they are paying you for support, anyway.
Communities have a lot of benefits, but there are some types of companies that won’t get much out of a community, often because their product is a better fit for top-down sales motions. In that case, don’t invest in building a community just because everyone else is doing it.