Please shoot me if you ever see the word "flywheel" in my website copy but... I'll admit it does convey meaning. If you checked out GitLab's latest investor presentation, you would have seen this slide which caught my attention: This is a great visual of how open core can be
Imagine getting invited to a friend-of-a-friend's house and then when you get there, there's no indication of where to go. Do you knock? Go through the house? Around back? Do you need to 'beware of dog'? Oh CRUD, did you forget to bring dessert?! Would you feel... awkward? Frustrated? Annoyed?
I mentioned last week that your community can curate your product's GitHub topic. I also made a side comment that you could watch it to spotlight new community projects. However, watching topics is not as easy as it sounds. I'll go over 5 ways you can do it today but
On GitHub, topics are used in the Explore section of the site. Topics can be used by developers in your community to "tag" their repositories – and it's very likely if you have any ecosystem at all, people have added a topic for your product (they just get automatically created so
When a developer leaves a comment on your work, you know you've cooked a tasty piece of content – they've engaged! But that's where the trail ends. If they copy/paste any code somewhere else, you won't really know. On the other hand, when a developer forks your content into their
If an open source project is created first and then a community grows around it before a commercial offering is available, I'd call this community-led growth (e.g. Redis, Red Hat). If an open source project is created alongside a commercial product (aka "open source core" or "open source startups"
