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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Find users that understand the limitations and find value in the product. That also means that what you work on will be what the users actually want rather than what they might want or what is fun to work on.

A good filter for what users find valuable is that they will pay for it.

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That makes a lot of sense, thanks!

Do you have any opinion if we should open-source the project?

Think in steps. Get 10 users, make em happy. Ask yourself how to get to 50, if no answer look at possible marketing campaign, open sourcing is one option for a marketing campaign

Thanks for the advice, that is a clever way to think about user-acquisition, breaking it down into smaller parts. We will try this once the next beta is ready!

1. What's the business model that uses open source?

2. Yes, I have an opinion. Fooling around with open sourcing the project is easier than shipping something useful and finding users and engaging with them. Until a significant fraction of people care about the project, nobody cares whether it's open source.

3. Open sourcing a project is not a road to free labor. Building a community of users is a potential way to garner useful pull requests. But a community of users comes first.

4. Generally, my impression is that building a community of open source users is harder than finding customers for a business.

Good luck.

Alright, thanks! We will hold off on the open-source idea for now.

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