Show HN: Flagsmith – open-source feature flag and remote config service

Hi Everyone. I started a London-based software agency back in 2001. We felt a lot of pain dealing with engineering teams of all shapes and sizes when devs were trying to release major changes without breaking anything. We spent a lot of time understanding why shipping is so hard, observing common patterns, and figuring out how we could make things better for our clients.

Flagsmith was born out of these learnings. We built it as an internal tool, and in 2018 we open sourced the project and launched a paid SaaS product. A year ago we decided to go full time and bring the commercial open source product to market. Since then we have grown revenue 10x.

Here are 5 of my biggest takeaways from that transition:

- Open source is the advantage. The community has benefited us with customers and contributions. It also gives us deployment flexibility, which we have seen be extremely valuable to our enterprise clients - that is why, for example, some of them prefer us over LaunchDarkly who has more features.

- Enterprises have money. Amazing, right? Don’t be afraid to ask more if your service brings value to them. We originally underestimated our price tag more than 10 times for these large customers. Early on, we lost deals for being too cheap!

- B2B software is not winner-take-all. You can always find a niche for your product, no matter how crowded the market. The 800lb gorilla will always have a blind spot; figure out what it is and leverage it relentlessly.

-The KISS principle works anywhere. The simpler your tech stack is the more likely you’ll be adopted by a big company. We’re running a REST API based on Django, a ReactJS front end and a SQL database – that’s it. If you have dependencies on a bunch of AWS services, you just lost an enormous amount of market opportunity.

- Know your customer. Track down their pain points, solve them, and you will be rewarded. We learn from feedback a lot. Recently we added Flag Archiving based on direct feedback, and it has been warmly welcomed.

These learnings have been really valuable for us, but we’d love to hear from other projects and founders who are pursuing the commercial open source route.