Mastodawn

Two days at #o5f5 were a blast. I met a lot of amazing floss company founders, and it was an eyes opening experience, at the same time extremely reassuring (everyone has the same problems, and given our maturity/size, we are doing very well), and also extremely humbling : so many brilliant people sharing their naked experiments, both success and failures.
And as a result, we worked 1h with @abrianceau on our market position and value proposition simplification, which is our grinding problem for months... and it was.. Easy ? At least, clear.

Building on the ashes and shoulders of giants, as it's said.

MinIO chose a set of monetization tactics, your mileage may vary, but the most important is : never compromise adoption for conversion. Adoption is your long term engine of growth

Then, adoption doesn't mean monetization.

Even huge one.
You need to be very deliberate on what you monetize (especially if vc are involved - and don't let them corrupt your product)

And be prepare to usual complaints of the free users

Second hard reminder : adoption isn't magic, open source us not a free pass to adoption. The product needs to be amazing.

Invest in adoption ease, make it slick and a joy to use

Next in #o5f5, how to transform wide spread adoption to commercial succees, with a hard fact reminder : freedom is not free.

You need money to build things, and if you don't choose how you get the money, you're at risk of having only bad option remaining

So you need to align compensation and company goals, but you must absolutely keep it super simple (else all kind of perverse outputs / optimization)

And a sale people who doesn't sale go out.

Also, absolutely compensate on actual money the company actually get now, else will run in complicated situation where you don't have enough money for commissions

Then, you really need to make the deal happen. Customers generally don't really know what they want, what you can do for them.
And they often value the idea that you're not just a vendor, but a partner.

You likely want to sell subscription because they are just easier to live with (better control, more money visibility, renewal as a point of contact, etc)

And then, invest in sales support (technical, legal, etc) : everything that can help make sale easier and more fluid