Hi everyone. I'm Anastasia, and today I want to share my view on how open source can be not just useful, but also profitable. And when we hear open source, many people think it means free, but open source, it's about being open, not about being free. And who am I or why? You can trust me. I'm co-founder and chief operating officer at Epic Max, where we built in support open source and commercial project with V js. I started my open source journey at 17 with Linux community and I spent more than 10 years in frontend development and project management. I also was the chief editor of the Open Source Magazine user in Linux for three years, and as you can see, I'm really not great at choosing usernames. And what you'll learn today. First I want to share with you our story in epic marks how much time and money we spent on opensource projects. Then I will show you three key parts of successful opensource projects and seven ization models with real and really cute examples. I will show you a stage of any open source project and which model fits best for each stage, and how to attract users depending on stage that you allow. And in the end of my talk of I will show you our biggest mistake, key lessons we learn and what we do now with our open source projects. And let's try to understand how must open and source project starts. Usually start like this. This tool doesn't work the way I want, so I want to build my own. And if your goal is to make your work easier. So helpful with the community. It's a great idea. Just forgot for forget monetization. You need to enjoy it. You can build what you love. No limit, no pressure. But if you want to turn your open source project into a business, you need to start thinking like a business founder. And you need to choose your strategy from day one. I believe only monetized project can be successful. And for building good product, you need to invest a lot of time energy and money. And if everything depend only on you, you will hit a wall one day and ask yourself honestly, is your project a hobby or a business? And for hobby project, it's a great opportunity to learn new skills, to connect with the community and build your portfolio and maybe find a great job one day. But if you want to build a business, it can grow your name bring you a real income, but you need to have a clear plan. And let me tell you how it all started in epic max. Our company was founded by a developer who didn't want to code loan, so he hired others. Classic story for technical companies. And we had no portfolio, no public project because all our previous work was under NDA. So we can show it, but we have a lot of love for VGS and opensource ideas. So we said, let's build something opensource, let's show to our potential clients and ourselves that we can build something real, something cool. And this is how Used Economy was born. It's a set of ready to use dashboard page. And in just few days it becomes the first most popular rep on GitHub. And it help us attract first commercial clients for our company and have confidence in ourselves. And it was great result. But we maybe we can stop on this and just continue. Concentrate on more commercial side of our company, but we continue in two direction. We working on client's project using ZE tool set and sometimes use our views to guide when we didn't push it a lot, but sometimes we use it for our client's project, but more most of our client use own tool set. Other. Admin templates or just some frameworks and we continue development and support of our open source product and invested money and time for it. And later that year, we publish it a small open source project at Big Spins. It's a set of flood and animations built only with CSS and to be honest, we did it just because we wanted to play around with CSS animations. And then we understood that our admin panel had a lot of components and in a couple of year we decided to move them into separate library. And that's how VKI was born. And in October this year, we started free online meetups for front-end developers, not only with UJS but yeah, it UJS talks. And at first we made it because we want to stay like a team and all our developers live different countries, but then some popular speakers start joining us and our meetups become regular and more public. And if you want to join us like a speaker or just a deep, please write me, I'll send you everything about it and let show you some numbers that we have for now. For admin, we have around 2000 forks and more than 10,000 stars for epic spin. We have 360 forks and almost 4,000 stars. For review, QI, we have 354 forks and 3,600 stars. And for future desktops, we have around 200 calendar subscribers and around 40, 50 people live. And let's do some quick calculation to understand how much it would cost you. Take your developers hour rate and taxes and multiply it by numbers. We number of hours we spent on our open source projects. I use this average mid-level developer rate. For Spain in this year, because I live in Spain, I use it for calculation to give you a clear understanding of the potential cost. It's not same with our spending, but more or less maybe we can say that yes, maybe it's something like that. And we spend more than 4,000 hours for, and it can cost you. 90,000 euro and you can ask me why it's so much, because it wasn't just one version of product. It was was three different version of use. Two admins. You need to do some redesign work because eight years ago we had. Different design styles and trends. You need to fix a lot of bugs. You need to support community do some discussion and discord work on docs, and it's a lot of additional work, not only development of product. And you'll create not only product, you'll create a technical depth. For AP experience, we spend around 470 hours and it can cost you around 10,000 euro. And why did it take so many hours? Because. Same, it didn't just finished with like a pet project because we need to have some landing page. We need to pay for design work and fix some bug and continue supporting. And for VT QI, we spent more than 22,000 hours. And using this average rate, it can cost you almost half of. Million Euroes so much. And for view talks, I think we spent nothing. And for now, I think we spent around four hours per month for everything to organize online event. And yes, we had more visibility and we looked better than other agencies. But we could have achieved more. So what went wrong? Why do some open source project make money and others don't? And the answer, simple, successful project have a strategy. And without a strategy, I want to say that I. Any open source project is just expensive hobby. And if you want to build open source seriously, you need to have this skill. First you need to have brutal honesty with yourself and, let me share with you the three kinks. The must have parts of any successful open source journey. The first kink, it's strong idea. Your product should solve a real problem. And how can you understand? Is it enough strong? You need to talk to people. Ask as developers for feedback. You can ask open source, community people here, super friendly, super open. You can watch what other people do, what your competitors doing, and maybe catch some ideas or understand what they did wrong and just interpret their mistake. Second key is active community and contributors. You need to engage people and then you can grow. And I'm absolutely sure that. Solid developers move slower and always stuck in their own mind. And you can have real feedback only from community because people use your quote in wrong, unexpected ways. And it's great because it's how you can grow your product. And I believe that having 50 small contributors betters and have three full-time developers that you pay and the last kink is sustainable monetization model is your long-term strategy. And let's try to understand how can you make money with open source? You need to choose the right model, let's say with seven of them. And to make it simple and fun, let's imagine you don't trade code, you make choose. And first meditation model is open core. Free shoes. Premium comfort. You give people free shoes for walking around the city, but if they want better comfort and stringent material they need to pay. And real examples in GitLab Grafana, elastic Short, this model best for projects that have a clear line between basic and pro. And good part of this model, you can attract many users because you can show something for free. They can test it, and you have flexible monetization. You control and decide what to sell. But it's hard to draw the line between free and paid functions. And it's really important because if you close everything, maybe don't want to you can't find contributors. If you are open too much, maybe don't nobody want to pay and you need to maintain two versions. It's will create a big technical debt and you'll can have this problem with big cloud providers that they can host your opensource project make some money and never pay you back. Maybe you heard about some stories, we use big cloud providers, and the next model is SaaS free shoes, paid cleaning and delivery. People can take your shoes and clean them by themself, but if they want clean ready shoes, deliver every week, you can offer this service. Real example in tech. GitHub Cloud Next Studio, Docker Hub. This model best for those who can offer host support and a good part of this model. You will have recurring venue. It's great for business. You can plan something, maybe hire a team, and it fully open source and community friendly. But it requires a lot of investment for infrastructure and customer support. Next model, dual li free for walks, paid for work. You can wear the shoes in the park for free, but if you are waiter walking 12 hours per day, you need a special version. You need to pay for it. And real example in tech, my security edge agreed this model best for tools used by companies and good parts and developers use it for free and they happy and companies should pay. And you have protection from big cloud, selling your product without paying, but you need clear leads terms and maybe lawyers. Next model. Supporting consulting shoes are free, but help is paid. You give the shoes for free, but if someone wants you to come check the feet change the install, they pay for your help. Real examples, in Tech, it's a redhead ut QI Next cloud. This model best for teams that can work directly with client and good part of this model. You'll have high value client and trust and long-term relationships. But it's not easy to scale because it depend on people and on your personal brand. And you still sell human hours, not product usage. It's a big limit and it's hard to scale. Next, model, plug and send. Marketplace base shoes are free decoration or cost money. You give basic black shocks for free, but if someone wants to have red laces, they can buy them separately. And real example, in WordPress and Grafana, this model best for project where you can add some extra and people pay only for what they need and they happy. And you can grow into a big and full ecosystem if you have a lot of different plugins. But you need to be community or it won't work because maybe your plugin can be a bit cheap. It hard to control plugin quality and consistency if you. Sponsorship. You make shoes and kind people support you. You say, I make some shoes for everyone. Please support me. And people donate because they love what you do. And real examples and blender. This model best for project with strong community and good part of this model, you kept everything fully open source and you can build strong emotional connection with community. You can maybe build some offline events. Bad parts. It's low and stable income and hard to plan growth or hire team. Maybe you saw cases where some open source project got a big sponsor, started hiring people and invest a lot, and then the sponsor put out and thing got really sad. And the last model that we want to discuss, it's courses and education. You make sure and teach others. You keep working on your open source shoes, but you also teach other how to make similar ones. Use online courses, host webinars, and office certification. Real example in Tech, Linux Foundation in View School. This model best for experts and community leaders and good parts of this model. You'll have stable income. It's great, and you can build a strong personal and project brands. And maybe if you decide to build something else in future, it's great because you already have some community and some audience. But you need to spend time and money to build content. And you need to have teaching and speaking skills, but I believe you can build it and maybe it can be distraction from product development, but this model I think it's easy to delegate it. You just can find some people with this experience and they can create content for you. So what is the best model? As saw this, it's no one perfect transfer. Most successful project used two or three MO models together, for example. Next, use SA consulting and support models, tower use listing and sponsors and hardware and Grafana use open core plugins and hoisting and how to choose the model. I think you need to understand where you now and let's try to understand which stage of open source product and which model fits best. First stage, early stage you just started and your goal here at good users get feedback and build community around your product. What matters here? Yes, it's easy to start, but you need to build trust and you need to focus on value, not money yet, and good models for this stage. It's sponsorship and maybe you can use GitHub accelerator program. I think they still don't have dates for application for this year. Maybe. Next month and if you build something with AI in title yes, maybe it's a good suit for you. You can use educational model, create some videos, blocks, and give talks, and you can do consulting. So where do you find first users? If you're on early stage, you need to follow some baby steps and please don't wait. For the lunch and something like 1000 stars on GitHub, you need to start sharing your story early, even before your publish your project. Because people love the protest and people love the stories. You can start with your idea that if you, only have idea for now. You can start create some content around it. Show it in some social media in LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram, even if you have some audience. You can start post on Reddit or Medium, join some Discord communities and you can start creating some audience for your future product. And it's important to share your values and goals because I think we all buy something. I believe we support only products that connected with our values. And if you start sharing it, you can have some early supporters and then early clients, you can do consulting. You need to be visible and helpful and ask for real feedback, not only for stars. And real feedback can come from some consulting work. You can offer some free help. But please always set clear boundaries. For example, if you build something like Time Check for companies, you can offer three free consultations. For example, first consultation for Setting Everything app second for train. Employees and the last one for some QA session. And if they want you to build some custom solution or continuous technical support, then you can offer some paid consultant. And you can become, maybe shouldn't become a speaker. And even small online meetups can give you some early users and zen future clients. And even one good offline talk can give you a lot of users, contributors, and future clients. And, you can look in for some small events in your city, maybe online events that we have in my company. I heard a lot of other companies have something like that. And next stage maybe is the most interesting growing stage. You already have some users and your goals here start earning money and scale the project. What matters here? You need to show people clearly reason, a reason to pay, not just please support me and you need to have. Simple pricing and you need to build repeatable income. Not only one of donation even, it's big. It's better if you have small, but a recurring donations. Good models here. It's open core SaaS and marketplace, and you need to split the feature in two groups, like free for everyone and premium for teams. Where do you find paying users? You need to start with your current users. Talk to them, ask what they paid for. Use some onboarding emails, discord channels, feedback calls, and you need to turn early adopters into early clients. And you need to promote your your product with real results because you already have some users, some case studies you need to create content post video, but more focused on solutions and success stories. And you can create some partnership program. If your product match to bigger ecosystem, you can collaborate with others, maybe agencies or product companies serving the same audience. For example, I know about partnership program in for VS. For next, for example. You can go for some. Websites for your ecosystem and try to build something that you can have clients and maybe like just users. But it's a great opportunity to start open yourself to other people in your ecosystem and. Maybe it is the most wanted stage. It's business stage when companies use your product. And Yoko here it's stable income and enterprise clients. What important here? You need to have great li security and compliance. You need to create clear business contract your. Company should looks like a serious business that big companies can trust and you need to offer long-term support. Good models here is to lead and support and consulting and open source open core plus CLA, how to grow and find users at this stage. You need to go where your clients are. For example, some tech conferences B2B events, and you can partner with agents that serve your audience. And you need to show yourself like a solution, not only product you need to, explain to business how your tool can save their money, time, and reduce risk because it's so important for enterprise companies. You need to showcase studies, benchmarks, create some immigration guides offer an audit, maybe start offering free audits and do it like wait and. You need to start hire right people with open source experience for sales. Yes, maybe you already have a big team of developers QA specialists or managers, but you need to have right person for sales, community manager. Content manager maybe, and generation specialist said, you need to start doing some boring stuff that may be nobody in tech. Love it. You need to create. Call, emails, do some demos, onboarding calls. It's more like doing regular commercial business. But if you want to grow on this stage, you need to do that because you have a lot of competitors, not only in open source world. On this stage, you compete with, commercial project and they have a lot of benefits for business. You need to show that you can offer serious support long-term relationship. You understand how business works. You need to have some business and sales skills for this stage. And if you did everything and still want to grow further, you. Need to find new markets, maybe new countries. Maybe it's right moment to hire business development manager. And you need to do upselling. Look into your client's database. Ensure you need to create some database in CRM. You need to, work with it and try to understand what you can sell for your current clients. Maybe you can offer more extra features, more consulting services, some custom development, and you can start looking for big fish in like cloud providers and create big partnerships. It's. Sometime it's so expensive, but maybe it's right moment to do that. If you already have some income and it's more or less regular, you can try to invest. But like carefully and then you will have great results. And back to our story in Epic max. Yes. After eight years in open source, we still on early stage, and if you find yourself in the same situation, please don't be stuck and frustrated. And yes, for us it could have cost us much less, but, let's try to understand where did we go wrong. We didn't have strategy or clear goals before investing for each product. And we have three different projects and we need to create a strategy for each product. It's not just one open source strategy, and if you have couple of project you need to separate your strategy. We expect that our developers can choose tasks based on business impact, not on the interest, but honestly, if we didn't understand our goals, how could they understand it? And we had lack of real experience using our product. In commercial project, yes, we had some clients with our products, but it's not enough for having. Good feedback and for improving our product, for staying competitive with others because yes, still for us, we have some big competitors and we didn't use it enough. We believed if we build something, user will come. And yes, we had some user and you saw it. It's really not bad results. But in mining, it's still zero. We was focused only on quote, on no on business strategy or marketing. And if we can merge everything that I said before in one sentence, we treated the project like a hobby. No financial planning, no donation set up. Still, we don't have it. No budgeting, no strategy sessions because it's something about like business, not about open source, but we invested in all of our project, like commercial projects, but. To be honest, we made a lot of mistakes, but we also did a few think really right. We built a strong team. We used our open source project like sandbox for all our new developers to test and are onboard them. And I think it's great results for us. I think all our developers are super cool, super technically skilled. Because I think it's not enough to have two, maybe three steps of technical interview for understand is it great match to your company? 'cause it's not only about technical side of person, it's a lot of soft skill. And maybe same vibe with us. And for us it was really important to find people with open source experience. And we have great team for now. I think we was focused, we choose one small technology and never looked, to others. We use only view JS for development and it gave us a clear niche and help it to sell for now. And we built trust in partnership in the view ecosystem. We start doing some partnership with Beautify and Prime View that maybe, yeah, we can say they our competitors, but I believe in open source world. We don't have competitors. We all partners and we finally recognized our mistake and started doing something in. Strategy for now, we almost stop on non-strategic investment in open source project. We focused more on view integrations, not only on creating some new components or fixing bug, and we stopped to be in silence. We started writing some articles, posting speaking on conferences and hosting on events. And what's next is this shift might finally move us to growing stage where we can have some stable income. And in this moment, smart investment truly makes sense and maybe we can create some paid product like ready to use package based on use stick admin maybe for FinTech for example, or legal tech. And maybe we can create some examples and plugins for Marketplace and sell them based on. But this time we absolutely want to start with strategic planning, clear financial model and real contributor involvement. It's that idea to do everything internal and let me share with you some key takeaways I want to leave to you. Open source needs more than just code. It needs strategy and clear goals. You need to choose human monetization model early based on your stage, and you need to focus on community first. But never forget the business side and like marketing side. You need to hire right people in the right moment and do sales like abroad if you want to have money. Mistakes are part of every open source journey. Just don't stay stuck and it's never too late toing, rebuild and grow your product and I believe you can do it. And thank you so much for your attention. If you like the talk, you can connect me on LinkedIn. If you didn't, please connect me anyway and tell me why. And if you have any question or ideas, I'd love to chat. And thank you for being here. Thank you for your attention to opensource community and goodbye.