.. This document is © Dimitris Glezos <dimitris@glezos.com>
   It is available under the terms of the Creative Commons
   Attribution-ShareAlike Licence 2.5


=========================================
 Super-charge your Startup with Openness
=========================================

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

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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!)

Make friends
============

Entrepreneurship is fun.

Enjoy it!


FIN
===

Thank you for your attention!

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

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