Every open source project hopes to achieve escape velocity, attracting enough users and contributors to become a successful, sustainable project that expands over time. But how do you attract developers and create the cycle of adoption that can lead to a thriving ecosystem?
It obviously starts with building a great product that developers love to use, and there’s an element of luck in finding this sweet spot and breaking through. But there’s also a lot that you can control. I was fortunate to have helped create an open source project, Streamlit, that expanded quickly and our company was acquired last year. I wanted to share what worked for me in the hope that it also can be helpful for you.
My guiding principle is to meet developers where they are and make it as simple as possible, at every step in the journey, to discover your project, learn how to use it and build great products. Depending on the type of open source project you’re creating, providing a simple way to share artifacts and use cases built from your code—in our case, this was applications—can also be a powerful way to raise awareness.
I think about this in terms of a “growth loop” with multiple points of entry where developers can get interested and get started. These entry points include developer forums, source repositories, your documentation page, learning assets, your website and more. The point is to eliminate friction at every point in this loop and make it as easy and fun as possible to start building and sharing with your code.
For organizations trying to get their open source project off the ground, here are some key learnings about what worked for my company in building this growth loop and some tips for driving continued adoption and innovation.
Be Visible in the Open Source Community
We made it a point to go where developers are already at, including forums like Reddit and Stack Overflow and conferences like ODSC and FOSDEM. Engaging with developers to understand what they really need from your project and how to reduce points of friction is key. We were always grateful when people gave us feedback and we reached out to any developer who engaged with our product, whether they had 10 followers or 10,000. I’ve found that developers really appreciate it when you “show up,” and you learn an incredible amount that can help your project succeed.
Give Developers What They Need
Don’t hold back features or functionality that developers will find useful. Developers should have access to everything they need and feel confident that they won’t run into a significant paywall that prevents them from scaling. Building a successful open source project is a bottom-up process, and that means eliminating barriers to entry and making your code as easy to use as possible.
Where developers go, enterprises typically follow. If you can build a tool that developers love so much they’re coding with it in their free time, they’re likely to take it into the workplace. If your goal is monetization, this is where you’re most likely to have an opportunity to recoup your investment.
Enterprises require particular features around security, access management, IT support, scaling, service level objectives (SLOs) and other areas—capabilities they are often willing to pay for. So, consider a model where you give developers everything they need to become super users and look for adjacent areas where you can charge for enterprise-type features or enterprise implementations that businesses need.
Make Sharing Incredibly Easy
If developers build great things with your code, it’s helpful if they can share those things with the community to show what’s possible and drive interest. You can think of this as a type of advertising. Most developers aren’t won over by traditional ads, but discovering cool things that other developers have done with your code can be a great way to attract new users and fuel the cycle of discovery and adoption.
So think about the natural output from your project that developers could share with the community. Can they put code on GitHub? Share an app or visualization they built? Post a speed comparison? What can they put on Twitter if they love your project and want to show what they’ve achieved with it?
Our project is for building data apps, so early on, we added a feature that allowed people to take a screen recording and share their work on Twitter so others could see it in action. Later on, we added a free cloud offering so they could directly share apps with the community. Think about what works for your project and how you could make sharing easy.
Create Amazing How-Tos and Tutorials.
These can be important entry points on your growth loop, and it’s best to provide them through developers’ preferred channels. YouTube is a go-to for tutorials of all types, and you can also leverage Coursera, Educative and other e-learning platforms. Someone on my team created a Coursera course for our project that has more than 20,000 enrollees, and one of our Code Camp videos has been viewed over a million times.
Get creative. If your project is starting to see traction among students, think about providing educational materials that professors can use in the classroom. Online interactive courses are not only a great way to learn programming, they make it easier for educators to manage coursework and see who’s keeping up. This is an excellent way to promote your project and capture new developers.
Documentation is another important entry point. Our documentation page is starting to look like an e-learning course itself, with guides for getting started, sample code and sample apps. Documentation pages can be listed by search engines, and we found it was worth the engineering time to make this happen.
Contribute to Other Open Source Projects
Giving back to the community is a good practice for anyone who cares about software, but it can also benefit your project: Contributing to open source projects helps ensure that your software will be compatible with the tools your target developers use. As well as ensuring interoperability, this can help raise awareness of your project in relevant developer communities.
Reaching critical mass with an open source project is about understanding what your target developers need, being smart with your resources and removing friction wherever you can. This concept of a growth loop worked for our project, and I hope it helps you to achieve success with yours.
