What keeps so many entrepreneur-curious developers from launching a product? In this series, I speak with dev founders to see what inspired them to launch. Reach out if you’re a dev-founder interested in sharing your story.
The importance of a product’s novelty is a frequently debated topic.
Many claim it’s impossible to have a unique idea. Some say it’s possible but more difficult. Others maintain it doesn’t really matter.
Regardless of your opinion, an idea’s perceived originality can be a hangup for those weighing whether to start a company.
That hurdle may be more pronounced for founders building with open-source or for the open-source industry. Their work is, after all, inherently public.
Open-source developer Orlie has worked in tech since he was a kid, first building websites and fixing computers.
He’s worked within open-source since 2013, seeing the space evolve from niche communities to an industry that’s worth more than $1 trillion. Orlie now works as an open-source consultant and is building an open-source Stripe App.
I spoke with Orlie about his journey in open-source entrepreneurship and how it differs from other indie projects.
Why’d you become an entrepreneur?
I wanted to decide who to work with. I wanted to make something successful with my friends! I’m still trying — the climb to the top is very long!
Another important thing for me was being able to be my own boss. If I make a mistake, it’s my head that is going to roll on the floor.
How’d you start in open source?
I started working in open source when I was at my first startup, a French email infrastructure solution that was directly competing with Sendgrid and Mailgun. Funnily, they were acquired by Mailgun in the end.
Back then among some of my duties, there was the task of maintaining our open source API SDKs — node.js and PHP as far as I can remember.
How’d that process look for you?
Throughout my career, I’ve open-sourced additional libraries and projects on my own. A lot of the things I have learned I have learned by “doing” and by “copying” what more successful projects would do.
How is building an open-source company different from others?
Open source can be seen as a scary place for many reasons.
First of all, I think people are afraid of showing your code to the rest of the world. If I open source my code what’s stopping another person around the world from just building the same business as I am? The answer is that nothing is stopping them.
It’s also hard to monetize open source. A lot of people aren’t good at understanding the monetization techniques in the open-source world and believe that just because it’s open source anyone can just take your code and profit from it. This is where understanding open source software licensing can become useful.
What stops people from building in open source
A lot of people think their code doesn’t live up to expectations. That might be true too. If your code doesn’t look clean or run well, someone else will probably, in the best-case scenario, open a PR to improve your code.
The important stuff when open sourcing your work is to make sure that it works just like it says in the instructions on the box. You, the maintainer/contributor of the project, are also the person in charge of adding the instructions to the box, so make sure those instructions are clear/understandable and unequivocally working as expected.
What skills did you cultivate to become a well-rounded entrepreneur?
Learning how to do marketing — other than just coding is super important. Selling is another skill I would never thought myself I would have the need to do and yet here I am reading books on how to sell — Demand-Side Sales 101 — and how to market things — all those by Gary V., Seth Godin, and Donald Miller.
Overcoming analysis paralysis
Just. Launch.
Harder said than done I know. But a ton of people will spend months refining their homepage, control panel, emails, and product and forget to build an audience. Get customers and/or early access users to provide you with feedback.
Another important thing is to find friends and mentors, whether you go to an Indie Hacker meetup (I host one in Austin, Texas) or you go to some other meetup where entrepreneurs go.
Orlie’s entrepreneurial rules to follow
Open source trends he’s watching
Enterprise support of open source work. It’s hard to give back to open source, I use hundreds of open source projects and if I were to sponsor every project used I would probably run into thousands of dollars of sponsorship every month.
As an individual, this might sound unsustainable, but as a company … not so much. It’s totally doable and in fact, a small cost that could be swept under the Corporate Social Responsibility matrix.
Open source and Web3
The rise of blockchain technology has definitely helped the open source world in one way or another. A lot of large Web3 companies are extremely open-source friendly.
There’s also a lot of negativity around Web3 and I share a lot of those negative feelings. That being said they don’t impact open source — in fact as more Web3 companies suffer from epic fail moments, the focus on having auditable code increases exponentially. When people lose their money, they suddenly start caring about being able to prevent this from happening again. The best way is to be able to audit the code and fix the problems ASAP.
This content was originally published here.
