Super-charge your Startup with Openness

aka. "Dr. OpenSource or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Startup"

Openness

• Most startups' friend
• Good, fast feedback
• Marketing
• Indifex rooted in openness and open source

But why?

• People uncomfortable with secrets
• So are your developers, customers, partners, VCs
• Make friends, not enemies
• Talk about your work, don't hide it
• Let your work talk about you

The nobody kid

Startup like a kid out of university

• Need to "get known"
• Prove yourself in the market
• Leverage every connection you have
• Learn from others', stand on shoulders of giants

On Openness

"Openness is quite frankly a state of mind, an attitude, and a modus operandi for many highly successful entrepreneurs." -- Jonathan Tower (Citron Capital)

• Enthusiasm and infectiousness
• Get feedback - learn - adapt - grow - repeat
• Choose openness over silence or obfuscation
• Make a big community your 'Open advisory board'

Invest in Openness

Transifex a successful product based on these values.

• Now at 16.000 SLoC
  • Adding reusable libraries, almost 30.000 SLoC
• Addresses an audience of 5+ million
• Mailing list of 25-strong
• Presented in a dozen intl conferences

Your Startup is You

"Successful, high-achieving companies have the same qualities as successful, high-achieving individuals."

Be open about your ideas and work at conferences.

Your startup will follow.

Open Source

Open source good for startups

• Think: Wordpress, JBoss, MySQL, Red Hat, JasperSoft, SugarCRM
• So much more than "tweak-friendly" and "cheap"
• Build on top of great products
• Expose your software to businesses from the community and learn
• Practically pitching at low cost for the customer (he can see the code!)
• Cut licensing costs

How can you compete with that?

Invest in Implementation

"Ideas Are Easy, Implementation Is Hard" (Guy Kawasaki)

• Twitter: Clone-able in 24 hours
  • Yet The hot kid in town
• Ketchup: My grandmother knows the recipe
  • Yet Heinz a 32K-employee 1-bn income company
• Transifex: Open Source from day 1
  • Yet people keep sending patches instead of forking

Open source benefits for Indifex

• Team building
  • A fantastic team of 5 highly talented hackers
• Tapped into vast amount of knowledge
• Testing, good, technical feedback (patches!)
• High-efficiency in developing
• Donations of 1 man-year of work, 3+ years of hosting
• Seminars (developing, communication, English!)
• Conferences
• Friends

Share the Vision

Transifex successful so far based on values of openness

Open = Allow others to share your vision and passion

(Thanks to Fedora, GNOME, Django, GSoC, EELLAK, conference folks, community!)

Have Fun

Make friends.

Entrepreneurship is fun.

Enjoy it!

FIN

Thank you for your attention!

• http://www.indifex.com/
• http://transifex.net/
• http://transifex.org/

Licence

Presentation freely available under the CC by-nc-sa 2.5 license.

reStructuredText sources: slides.rst and ui/indifex/*.

Slides based on the S5 presentation system and Martin F. Krafft's work.