Ask HN: Go to market strategy for an open source based startup
We're about to start raising money. We're planning a paid version and already have a roadmap for that with clear differentiation from the open source version based on feedback from potential customers.
The primary questions we're still figuring out are:
1. What should be a bigger priority in the first year? Growing the open source community or acquiring paid customers?
2. What metrics should we use for measuring the success of the open source version? Contributers? Github stars? Downloads? Number of Kubernetes clusters on which we run? These metrics matter both for measuring our own progress and for showing investors.
We've heard very different answers to the above questions from different advisors. Does anyone have experience with this?
Thank you