This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Allard Buijze, the CTO and founder at AxonIQ. We talked a lot about the importance of open source for getting feedback on your product and validating your idea — or not.

One of the things we talked about was how the beginning of AxonIQ was tied to the same consultancy that developed Spring Source; Rod Johnson, the founder and CEO of Spring Source was on the podcast a couple months ago and you can listen to that episode here.

We talked about:

Spinning the company out of the an established company, and in particular how Allard ended up becoming co-founders with his former boss, and got buy-in from their previous employer to found the company after the open source project took open.
How they underestimated some elements of human psychology around sunk costs and how it would impact people’s willingness to move from the open source project to the paid product
Why they originally had two products, and then decided to merge them into one single product
How the key turning point for the company was when a new salesperson joined the company and convinced them to quadruple the prices; the result was both an increase in revenue per customer but also an increase in the number of customers.
How they evaluated the success of the decision to consolidate the two products into one.
How product market fit is a journey, not a destination.
How each individual hire can impact the way your product and project is perceived in the world; and it’s important to get alignment on what people are saying.
The importance the avoiding confusion among potential customers

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Are you leading an open source company and struggling with product strategy? I will help you improve the quality of your conversations, so people understand your product sooner, remain more engaged in the conversation and understand the relationship between your product and project. Learn more here.

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