Your OS project's role in a repeatable sales process
If the goal of a company is to build a repeatable sales process, what role does your open source project play towards making that a reality?
Let’s back up. There are usually a couple (business) reasons people say they are building and investing in an open source project and community. They are:
Get feedback on the project/product
Build loyalty and recruit evangelists from the community
Hire people from the community
Get leads from your open source community
Build awareness about your company through the open source project
Ease adoption, with a bottoms-up adoption strategy
Increase trust (because people can inspect your code base)
Ideally, you’ll be able to get all of these benefits from your open source project, nonetheless it’s wise to think about which one or ones are most important to you and your company. Also, these reasons are not created equal. I do not like the idea of viewing your open source project users as leads. Not necessarily because I’m an open source hippy, but rather because I think it’s a poor business strategy that risks alienating users and doesn’t acknowledge the reality that overlap between your open source users and your potential customers looks like a Venn diagram, not a target. For some companies, the relationship looks like two circles that don’t touch — regardless, the profile of an open source users is fundamentally different from the profile of a potential customer.
So that eliminates the most obvious way your open source project might fit into your repeatable sales process. It’s not a lead machine. I do not think that viewing your open source community as a part of your pipeline is a healthy or accurate way to think about your community. So here’s how I do think it can fit in:
Making the adoption process faster. If your GTM strategy is primarily bottom-up, your open source project is a key way people discover your company and get their first taste of what the product does. Your OSS better be awesome, because otherwise those users will assume the commercial product sucks, too.
Make it easier for procurement/security to say yes, because open source can be inspected for any security issues. The fact that you’re open source can decrease the risk that deals will unexpectedly fall through at the end of the sales process because of trust issues.
Gain a foothold in your target customers’ workflow. It’s one thing to have a first conversation with a prospect that you’re explaining your commercial product to, a very different experience when you’re saying “We know that 15 people on your team already use our open source project, don’t you think you should try our even better commercial offering, which also comes with a support contract?” Which deal do you think closes faster?
Cultivate internal champions. While open source users are often distinct from your customers, especially from your buyer persona, they can be powerful internal champions. In fact, community-powered evangelism is one of the major advantages of open source startups have. Internal champions can become a core part of your GTM strategy.
You notice, though, that there’s still no direct link between open source project and closed deals. The open source project can make things smoother, but at the end of the day an enterprise deal is still an enterprise sale, and your open source community is not a pool of leads. So your open source project is not a replacement for a concerted sales effort or thought put into building a repeatable sales process. You still need to know your ICP, your value to users and buyers, the pain points you solve. You still need to sell and you still need to make deals.