How we convinced founder-angels to invest in our developer tool startup

Open Source is your brand/value, which means it is your (genuine) marketing/evangelism. Being the news/story item itself gets you ahead of your competitors, who may be the advertisement along side your article.

Use this traffic to create an edifying, positive community. You will be surprised at how high quality of people will show up at your doorstep (if your message from the previous step resonated well) - governments, enterprises, investors, employees at startups, compatriots of complementary technology.

Now curate and start building relationships with the most promising of those people, such that they like you better than their own workplace. They are intimately aware of the problems/needs of their organization, and you help them build a solution to that specific need/pain-point on top of your Open Source developer tool. Now that an inside sale is happening, make some moves:

1. There is no need for that person to give his/her custom solution to their employer away for free.

2. Have that person leverage the solution as a massive role promotion, such that they are (or already were) "in charge" and can sign off on large recurring support contracts directly for your technology. OR

2. Have that person require their employer to pay license fees in order to use their customized solution. Guess who now needs outside help/leverage to enforce/deliver on that contract? Your friend, who if the employer doesn't purchase the contracts, will be poached by you.

3. Poach them anyways, acquire the rights, and make them the PM for your customer so you keep happy ties. Now that you've cracked that market open, expand to the rest of their competitors.

4. Fund raise based on all this progress.

Of course, it is slightly different depending on what their role/position is, if it is an enterprise or not, etc. you have to make your best call/judgement as the CEO. Like with everything.

It is working for us. :D