The Open Source Career!
How to level up your career through open source projects, the paths and possibilities.
Introducing money to open-source projects is creating a ticking time bomb.
Monetizing open source is not accessible if you are a junior working on a project or even a senior with an idea. The issue with open-source monetization is the stress added to the project and the promises you need to fill! Monetizing a project might exceed your expectation. Here I am sharing views on monetizing open source and a few resources that can help you to get insights about it.
The motivation
The central part of this conversation is you and your motivation. Why are you doing open source, and what’s your goal? Is it to gain skills or create a project? Based on that, you will know the path you need to follow! Based on my podcast with Brian, he suggested the next:
90% of success is from showing off
The best outcome of open source is to think about it as a way to gain new skills, show off your commitment and skills, and work on a project. Showing off is like paying for a paid Udemy or Coursera course but more on real-life projects.
Try contributing to a project you like and maintaining friendships with those working on it. This way, it gives you more than just money. It gives you a long-term company with someone you know you might talk with if you had a problem with this tool or if they had an opening.
An awesome idea:
If you have an idea and plan to monetize, and you figured this out, you can go with sponsorships which is a great way to do that. But this path is tiring and has an impact on the long term. To achieve it, you need to have the required skills or start at an early age.
To do such, you will need to gain users first, build your fan base then figure out a way to either seek sponsorship from individuals or monetize it like the VueJs model.
Open-source projects die after monetization.
Many open-source projects die after putting a paywall or having a financial relationship with the users. Paywalls bring two issues to the table:
Fast shipping and release:
Fixing and releasing new features will be the output expected from those who pay for your project that was open source. Doing this will put you under stress to create a new feature or release every week, which can be a challenge!
Commitment
The users who paid for you will expect your commitment to the project, fast reply, and even fast bug fixing. If that does not happen, they will question the value of paying for your product.
You can ask yourself whether you are ready for this.
Cutting off the user funnel
The paywall will cut off your user acquisition funnel, there will be no contributors to visit your project or even code for you, and neither will have a community around it. The whole project will be exclusive to those who pay for it, which can harm gaining numbers.
Open source can help you to increase your customer acquisition funnel.
Some companies had a great experience when they had open-source projects. Brian provided an example to the Hadith Tech podcast when he mentioned a company getting a double user acquisition funnel through an open-source project! They used to have ads on Google, but their open-source project is valued more! In the end, that project leads to more users.
The value they provided through open source was the problem they solved, which helped the users to get into the project and use it. Instead of getting stuck in the usual onboarding process, they had it in a more accessible, straightforward way through open source.
You can still find more, yet those are the ones that came to my mind.
Projects:
Here I am featuring three projects that have outstanding issues and structure that you can check to contribute or see if they have problems to resolve:
Calcom:
The open-source alternative to Calendly, it’s been active and has outstanding issues, structure, and bugs that you can start gaining experience in.
OpenSauced:
The company helps to discover engineers in open source, which can help companies to hire or attract better
Ivy:
The open-source unified machine-learning platform they are working on has one model for all available frameworks.
This list is a step to show you how to start working on a project and give you the tool to work on that. You can still check any other project that aligns with your skills and values to work on it. Remember, be kind and be yourself when you work on open source.
Communities:
More than learning programming is required to start your career or find a job. It’s all about communities and human interactions. You might need to surround yourself with people with the same mindset or people who are ambitious to help you grow, as peer learning would be a better way to help and gain experience. It will make you feel that you are not alone. Here I am sharing a list of communities and conferences that’s not exclusive, but you can start from one of the three mentioned:
FreeCodeCamp:
FreeCodeCamp provides articles, courses, and even tracks for those who want to learn to program. Their content is wide-ranged, and you can gain excellent skills from them and apply them to the companies in the previous sections. They offer a forum to ask questions and communicate with the people there.
GitHub Campus Expert:
This is a university program if you are a student who loves open source or wants to contribute and gain perspective from people in this area or even lead a community. Then this program for you helps you to have
MLH:
MLH is a student hackathon league that provides training, support, and even mentorship for their community. You can find a hackathon they have organized to learn from it or even start one in your city.
Today we provided the following:
a short article about how to get into open source,
showing you communities,
projects, and
the motivation you can set for yourself while working on open source.
In the following letters from this newsletter, we will talk more about open source from different perspectives and show a few success stories from the community.