Using Open Source to Grow Business. Month #6
In my previous article, I shared some thoughts on how open source may help software development business grow. Today my team has 2 popular open source products launched, and we’re ready to share our experince.
We founded Epicmax 6 month ago and we had literally nothing. Nothing except an unfinished vue.js admin dashboard template that was no more than another hobby project, a nice UpWork profile and money that was hardly enough to pay a month’s salary. Quite a risky situation, I’d say.
Still, we had a feeling that an unfinished admin template must be the key. We’ve put all our efforts into making it a complete open source product. We started as a team of five and had one month to either make it and get clients or fail and start looking for a bit less exciting jobs for bigger companies.
Then, a little miracle happened — a couple of days after we gathered, one of my UpWork clients asked for help, so a teammate of mine started to handle the project. Suddenly, our financial situation turned out to be less desperate and the rest of the team continued developing the admin template.
In the beginning of August, Vuestic was complete. We were exhausted and excited at the same time. And then, the launch started… It was fantastic! Vuestic became GitHub trending repo №4 and got lots of positive feedback — a reward from the community we are really thankful for.
How Vuestic helped us?
In my previous article, I stated that for a web-development company having nice open source products may be more effective in attracting clients than writing tons of cold letters and submitting numerous UpWork proposals. Well… I’m still using UpWork and writing cold letters. And I still hate it.
But anyway, everything is much better now. With an open source portfolio we’ve got way more responses. All our current clients have some tech background and they were really impressed by Vuestic (the template was the main reason why they started working with us).
Moreover, recruitment comes easier now. We are located in Belarus, and the IT sphere really stands out here. Most of the other spheres are experiencing stagnation while software development companies are flourishing. As a young company, it is really difficult to stand out in the eyes of developers. In the very beginning, nobody wanted to join (and they were right — we started from the very bottom). But now people we’re talking with look at out GitHub profile and get excited. A new teammate joined us in December and one of the main reasons for that was our open source activity.
Putting hands on the next open source product
Vuestic was really massive and expensive for us. Once we finished it, we concentrated on looking for new clients and finally making at least some money. Also, to be honest, the product took lots of our energy, so we were not ready to start something new.
By the end of autumn, we felt ourselves safer and refreshed and decided that we were ready. But ready for something smaller than an admin dashboard. After browsing tons of articles and GitHub repos, we finally came up with an idea — a collection of cool html/css loading spinners available both as html/css code snippets and as customizable vue.js components.
There are lots of similar libs on GitHub. Our main focus was on the ease of usage. If you want to check the spinner inside your app, just click to copy the code and you’re ready to go.
So, in the middle of December, we launched Epic Spinners. People liked it, we got into GitHub trends and received 1200+ stars in a month. By Christmas, we were happy and a bit tired.
What’s next?
January 2018. We started with one unfinished product and no resources. We are still a team of five. But now we have two popular opens source products, traffic on GitHub and a couple of happy clients. We feel better and ready to grow.
We believe in the power of open source. We have no exact plans but a feeling that 2018 will be an important year for us with the achievements we will be proud of.
In the meanwhile, we will be working hard and I will keep you updated along our journey. Cheers!
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