Why I'm making my latest product open-source

Over the past few years I've built numerous SaaS products. Some successful, and some that flopped completely. A similar sounding story to most indie hackers.

I've always admired OSS (open-source software). Some of my favourite products and some of the biggest tech companies are OSS, and there's nothing more satisfying than when you're using an open-source library for a product, you encounter a bug, and you directly fix it with your own pull request.

Why open-source?

Open-source software is magic. You're opening up your product to a wider audience, and if you nurture that audience properly you can create a thriving community of contributors, and people that naturally become strong advocates of your product.

Making your product open-source makes your product more diverse, as anybody from any part of the world can choose to contribute. This gives a small dev team unique ideas, opinions and collaborative ways of solving problems.

Open-source products are also more trustworthy for longevity reasons. Since the code is open, if the company behind the product ever ceased to exist, then code could still live on.

One of my favourite reasons for open-source is also the sense of giving back. People who are first starting out in their development journey can accelerate their learning by contributing to the product, and getting feedback from more experienced devs in the process.

Initial open-source concerns

"What if someone steals the code?". This is one of the questions that I used to ask myself when originally thinking about making an open-source product.

What helped me get over this was realising that the value in a product isn't just in the code. Hear me out. Anybody can theoretically build a product. If they can't build it themselves, then they can hire somebody else to build it.

What they can't steal is your mentality. If somebody copies your code and sets up their own product, you can almost guarantee they won't stick it out and it won't last longer than 6 months. If the person isn't committed enough to build out their own product, then they won't have the guts, determination and will power to build a real business.

What I'm building

My OSS product is Reflio. Reflio allow you to create a referral program for your SaaS. My motivation to build Reflio came when I was looking to integrate referral programs into my other products, and was surprised that I couldn't find any where you could pay on a per successful referral basis. I didn't want to pay $29/month upfront without knowing if referral marketing would work for me or not.

Originally I thought the idea was too big, so I left it. But I kept thinking about it. Eventually, my partner was going away for the weekend, so I decided to a weekend hackathon where I'd attempt to build as much of it as possible in 1 weekend. It went as you'd expect, I never completed it. But importantly, it allowed me to gain valuable feedback and early access subscribers.

We're launching very soon. Reflio is live on GitHub (please give us a star!), and our early access list is still open.

I'll write another post when we're live documenting how launch went, and more of my thoughts about open-source when it's a bit further down the road.