Perfection doesn’t give you an advantage if your competitors spent years building an open source community
To kick off the Open Source Growth Guidebook interview series, Mend-Orshikh /MJ/ had a great discussion this week with Norbert Sendetzky from Aimeos PHP E-Commerce Framework, an eCommerce solution that lets you easily create a webshop, online store, or marketplace.
Here are some insights that can be applicable to any kind of open source projects:
🧐 Open source projects aren’t things that go viral. Optimizing your page for search engines (SEO) is usually much cheaper.
😍 Developers who are enthusiastic about an open source product can convince their peers much easier to try the project than by marketing.
📢 Release early! Perfection doesn’t give you an advantage if your competitors had several years for building a community in the meantime.
The last insight shows how Aimeos’ growth success embodied the iterative mindset and power of communities.
I also appreciated the following points made by Norbert, as it clearly demonstrates more practical benefits of an open source project:
➕ Open source projects have an advantage over closed source projects because it’s easier to convince people to try your product, if they can start without spending money.
🚀 If you don’t have big budgets for marketing and sales, releasing software as open source is extremely important to gain popularity and market share.
👉 Read the full interview here: https://erxes.io/blog/posts/increasing-growth-by-building-community
