Join the community

Do you wish you had a place to turn for company-building advice that’s specific to open source companies? It’s true that some startup challenges are the same for proprietary and open source companies — but not all.

If you’re looking for a place to connect with other founders, share ideas, challenges and triumphs, that doesn’t facilitated by your investors, well, maybe The Business of Open Source community is for you.

Who this community is for:

  • Founders of open source startups/companies. An ‘open source company’ means any company where an open source project is core to the company’s survival.

  • Either bootstrapped or venture-funded, but you should have either venture funding or revenue. Rough guideline, you have at least 5 team members other than the founders.

  • All founders welcome, whether you’re the ‘business’ founder or the ‘technical’ founder.

  • You’re not afraid of talking about money and open source! The assumption is that everyone in the group is dedicated to building a financially successful software business.

Is that you? Reach out and let me know — I want to talk to every community member before letting them in, so I can evaluate fit.

What you’ll get out of it:

  • Ideas for open-source-startup-specific strategies and tactics that you wouldn’t have otherwise considered

  • More confidence in your model (or, conversely, less confidence, in which case you might get more confidence to make a change)

  • A larger pool of experience to pattern-match what works and what doesn’t.

Bottom line? This community is about increasing the chances that open source startups in general and your open source startup specifically are financially successful.

Quick FAQs:

  • Is this free? Yes, free as in beer!

  • What about free as in speech? The group is founders only, no VCs, no media. If you join, you agree to keep conversations confidential. Of course, there will still be stuff you’d like to say but wouldn’t like to put in a Slack channel, that’s up to your discretion. Save that for an in-person MeetUp, which I hope we can do in the future.

  • Will my competitors be part of the group? Maybe, if they’re open source startups. If you can’t stomach that possibility, don’t join, or join, check if your competitors are here and then stick around if not.

Quick and dirty code of conduct:

  • Be blunt, don’t be a jerk. It’s a fine line, but try to walk it.

  • What happens in TBOS Slack channel stays in TBOS Slack channel… we’re not signing NDA or anything, but the goal is to cultivate a respectful community. If you screenshot conversations and post them on social media I will kick you out.

  • This sort of falls under point 1, but we’re not going to rip people to shreds because we think their licensing decisions are bullshit. We will, however, commiserate when others talk about how they’ve been ripped to shreds on social media by people who think open source maintainers shouldn’t be able to support themselves financially.

 
 

Want to join?

Reach out — and if we’ve never met before, I’ll want to chat with you before letting you in. I want to make sure the community would be a good fit for you and where your company is, and also make sure you’re not an asshole.