Getting people to use the features you already have with Eric Holscher

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs. We had a really far-ranging conversation that included talking about why documentation is often so bad, why documentation should be a priority, but also Eric’s experience building Read the Docs and Write the Docs. This episode was interesting because it’s both about building an open source company and also about the importance documentation for software projects in general and open source projects. 

Some things we covered included: 

• What is documentation? Is it a marketing effort, is it a part of the project itself? Eric talks about how good documentation for an open source project is a clear signal of a level of seriousness for the project. 
• How Read the Docs was really started to support open source projects, and that is part of why there’s no enterprise installs — either you use the open source code on your own, or you use the hosted product.
• How Eric sees building in the open as a way to help other people become better software engineers, but that ‘helping companies use Read the Docs for free’ is not the reason he wanted to build an open source company, and he’s still not sure how to feel about the fact that this happens. 
• You don’t get bonus points for being open source or bonus points for being bootstrapped — it won’t prevent a potential customer from using a competitive product because it has a feature that Read the Docs doesn’t have. 
• How open source in general — and even documentation in general — can help build brand value, but it is super hard to quantify and put in a slide in a board meeting to justify an investment in open source. 
• The decision to build Read the Docs as a business stemmed from the pressure that Eric got from having a successful open source project. 
• How they tried very hard to avoid accepting advertisements, but they should have started doing so much sooner because it turned out advertisements is well-aligned with the things they want to be working on. 
• The difference in risk between being open source for a database company versus an app-level open source project like Read the Docs; for Read the Docs one of the risks is the brand damage associated with people running the OSS on-prem and doing a bad job. 

Are you the founder of an open source company and struggling with figuring out how to manage the relationship between the project and product? You might want to work with me. 

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