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It's not advice for _all_ new products. Excalidraw has a plus plan, and I'd be curious to learn if they're seeing success. I think if you make something highly highly accessible and lovable, there will be opportunities to make money. Not sure! It's just a core belief of mine. I'm also sure there are products like that that can never figure out the pivot to $.

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The plus plan has been very successful from my point of view, we’ve been able to bootstrap the business and make our first hire.

The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt.

They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well.

The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now.

Impressive.

How did you get people to try the free version? What worked?

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