The double-edged sword of big initial customers with Taco Potze

The Business of Open Source

This week I’m back from vacation and I have a new episode of The Business of Open Source, with Taco Potze!

Taco is the co-founder and CEO of Open Social.

A couple interesting takeaways from our conversation:

• When you’re transitioning from a services company to a product company, it’s much easier if the product you work on is connected to the services your clients are already paying for.
• Landing a huge customer, particularly if it’s your first customer, can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you have a lot of revenue, but you also risk becoming your customer’s servant and losing control of your product’s roadmap.
• You can’t do everything; and particularly you can’t build a product that meets the needs of small, medium and large organizations.
• Sometimes you need to re-launch / reposition. Open Social recently completely changed their positioning earlier this year in response to changes in the marketplace and how their customers were use the product.
• Customers might not care about open source, but they care very much about lock-in, exit costs, and data sovereignty. This is all a part of risk management that CIOs are thinking about a lot.
• Some organizations use both the self-hosted and the SaaS product.
• One of the biggest / most instructive mistakes they made was maintaining completely separate codebases. When they invested in merging the codebases, it dramatically improved the customer experience in relation to updates, bug fixes and simplicity of the engineering effort.

We talked about Open Source Founders Summit at the end — and which is where I first met Taco. If you’re interested in joining us in 2026, sign up for the newsletter! Tickets will be on sale soon.