Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Tom Hacohen, CEO and founder at Svix. We kicked off the conversation by talking about why Svix is an open core company… but Tom still initially didn’t think he’d be a good guest for the podcast. Unlike a lot of open source companies, Svix doesn’t make open source a huge part of its identity. Yes, there are business reasons for being an open source company, but the open source nature of the company isn’t plastered all over every piece of marketing material.

So why does it matter?

• Developers prefer open source, and they’ll always choose the open source option if there is one. On the other hand, developers don’t often have buying power (and don’t even know how to buy software even if they did). But developers can influence buying decisions, and that can be important.
• We also talked about how there are different constraints that the open source project and the cloud version operate under. For example, ease of deployment doesn’t matter in the cloud version, because it doesn’t impact user experience at all. But the opposite is the case for the open source project, and that leads to different technical decisions.
• We talked about the problem getting information about people who use the open source project, because it is hard to get developers to talk. This is a puzzle that Tom says he still hasn’t cracked.
• Being an open source / open core company is a distraction, and it can be hard to manage externally and internally.
• We talked a lot about trust — how open source helps you earn trust, but you still need to earn and keep the trust.

Want to talk more about the ins and outs of running open source businesses, and how open source companies win? Come to Open Source Founders Summit next May in Paris. And if you’re struggling to figure out how to monetize your open source company, you might want to work with me.