The Good and the Bad of Starting an Open Source Company

Discover the inspiring journey of Matti Nant, co-founder of Formbricks, as he shares how he turned an open-source hobby project into a thriving business. Learn about the challenges and successes of building privacy-first, self-hostable survey software, securing support from the GitHub Accelerator, and navigating the world of open source licensing, monetization, and community contributions. Perfect for developers, entrepreneurs, and open-source enthusiasts!

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Transcript

Welcome to another coffee with developers Today I'm here with Mattin Nant who's the co founder of formbricss and he's one of those courageous people that actually tries to build a product starting in open source and seems to be quite successful with it. So first of all how are you doing and what is form bricks? Thanksah. I'm doing great. Formbr is an open source survey and experience experience management solution with a huge focus on self host stability and privacy first.
That's the main reason why we open source and the niche that we have found for our product. So basically you can run it on PREM or your on devices so you don't need any cloud provider. What is the platform that you need? Like what technology does it run on? We're mainly a single next JS server so you mainly only need Node js.
We provide pre built docker images and also a one click hosting script. So you just need a bare Ubuntu server, you can just run our script and then like two minutes later it's up and running. So that is a market that necessarily was traditionally in an open source space. So is the on prem and security and privacy thing you'selling point there or is it just like you said, let's go and try if that market is ready for open source as well. Yeah, it kind of developed as our selling point.
It mainly just started out as a hobby project. I was building in the like survey ecosystem with my previous company already and then I thought like okay, giving like the whole shift towards more privacy, the whole GDPR that came up, I thought open source would be the next step. So I just set up like a survey platform as a hobby project and it started getting first traction. And then also with having this project online I met my co founder, we started working on it more and then over time with all the community traction we got, and especially then the first like bigger corporations that started using formbricks we realized that privacy first and self hostability is the niche because the whole space especially surveys, there are so many survey tools out there so you need to have your like need to find your USP on that. So as the geek who does the things we're normally really bad at starting to promote it and actually getting people out there I guess.
I mean with the octocadat behind you, you got help and you got support from GitHub. How did that came around? How did you, how did you manage to backag that? Like we just applied in like two years ago. They started to promote their first Accelerator program or the first batch of the accelerator program.
And we thought like, okay, it sounds like perfect timing. We just started with the project and we just got the first community traction from our product hunt launched and hacker news launch and then we applied. We totally forgot about that for three months and then they shoot us an email said hey, we are in. And we were so excited because we just like two months ago we decided to go full time on this but kind of underestimated how, how soon we get profitable or find VC money with that. So we're very happy that GitHub wanted to support us because also the support included $20,000 split between all the maintainers and then of course meeting all those great people in the GitHub accelerator cohort.
So I guess the biggest impact was getting to get to know the right people through them, that doors opened for you that you normally would never have opened yourself or never even knew where the handle was right. And also because the whole like open source ecosystem is very diverse. So as an open source project you have many different options how to proceed with that or with the project. You can, you could say I just want to maintain a project on the side. It's enough for me as I have a full time job.
But as soon as you want to make this like your full full time job, there are different options. You can rely on sponsorships via GitHub sponsorships and open collective or you can say I bu a startup around it. And even if you build a startup, you can either bootstrap it or get VC money. And the GitHub accelerator helped us to show us also all those different perspective perspectives. Then they invited every week new guests.
We got to talk with the creator of U J'WITH the founder of Plausible, founder of Sidekick, different VC investors that helped us like get our own opinion. Because one time for example, the founder of Plausible said like don't raise VC money, it's the baddest idea ever. Bootstrap it. And then the next like then next week VC investor comes in and tells you the direct opposite. And yeah, getting to know those people and then also getting those different perspectives and finding your own way of building that was very helpful.
What are traps that you think you found or you got? You got basically that people war you about that you wouldn't have found otherwise. Like what are things that you basically what are things that you heard from other people that try to do the same thing as you and that they. That completely backfired as you said. Like one of them said don't do Any VC funding?
Other people say do VC funding. But are there some danger signs that are offered to anybody who's doing an open source project that are always a bad idea? Or is this something that is from project to project differently? I think it's from. Yeah, very differently from project to project.
But there are some things that are special to open source that you need to which makes sense to think about beforehand. One, one thing is like how do you want to manage and communicate with the community? And another thing which is very important is what license to choose for the project. And also if there are also stories for example from plausible, who in the beginning like for them chose the wrong license and then that kind of backfired and this learning helped us then to choose for us right license from the beginning on. So what license was that?
Was it like MIT did? You couldn't use it commercially and you used a hybrid one or what were the problems there? So we are currently using AGPL license or a mix of AGPL and MIT because we also have parts that are like NPM plugins that you can use in your own node projects. And then they need to be MIT licensed. And for Plausible they started out with an MIT license.
And then an MIT license is a very permissive license. You can essentially, once you find a project on mit, you can do everything that you want with the code. And then also for plausible there were like bad actors who copied their code and like sold it as their own project without any modification. Maybe they changed out the logo or something and that was something that. Yeah, especially for company like Proz.
They don't appreciate the work, they make money from it and they maybe even like yah, give. Give the whole project a bad reputation. And so they also changed to agpl since with AGPL it's a copy left license. So every time you make modifications to the software, you also need to publish that as AGPL as well. And also for every customer or every user using the software, you need to provide them also with the source code.
So it's kind of harder to just steal code and then sell it. And if you sell it, yeah, you still need to publish apl. So the customer needs to decide if they're willing to give you money for that or not. So it feels like Creative Commons BYY license that basically you can reuse it, but you have to mention the original creator and you can you use it, not use it commercially, but only for also free stuff if you want to. So there's all these things.
Do you think, did you talk to a lawyer about it or did you read it all up yourself? Is it worthwhile to get a lawyer involved? I think at some point we will get a lawyer for that but for now we just just talked with other founders in the open source space. I discussed a lot of things with Chat GPT and so yeah at the moment we feel comfortable that our approach works but I think in the future when have more money or the project grows more, we will likely also consult a lawyer on that. How do you work around the problem that when you start an open source and I see it as a mistake that a lot of people do, they start as open source and they give everything out for free and it's like everything is endless, endlessly free and like you don't need to worry about it.
And then sooner or later you have to start charging because you just money has to come in and somehow the light has to be turned on or kept on and then they actually lose or aggravate a lot of the community. So how did you handle that one and is there something that you would have done differently now or is it still in the honeymoon phase right now that everything'okay? It's definitely a topic we are like which is currently challenging for us since over the last two years we've built a software product which essentially we gave everything for free and now we've seen that we need to yeah get some perspective on getting profitable with the whole project since we also we have we are a team of six at the moment and we're all doing this full time. And also the whole project like benefits a lot from us doing this full time and not part time.
And it would have been good if in the beginning we have thought more about what essential like what is what should be open like we are following an open core model, what should be included in this open call model like what should be completely free and what are the premium features on top. Since we have now realized that there are a few features that are for example like a single sign on sso. This is a feature that most hobby users don't care about but a lot of like enterprises care about and those enterprises are willing to pay money for that.
But now it's kind of hard to tell the community okay, sorry we just like we reconsidered. We now remove SSO from the free from the free version. We are currently like're trying to manage those things but we will also in the next few releases see how this turns out as we are now planning to move this to the enterprise side. But yeah it would definitely help in the beginning to be very clear about your vision, where the project should go and think about how would you like to monetize that solely on software as a service? Would you like to follow an open core model?
Would you like to charge for support? Like how do you want to build a sustainable project business out of that? And then yeah, follow these guidelines from the beginning on. That's definitely something we could have done better. But I think we are still so early that we can correct in a way and like try to give the existing users all the features that they currently have.
But maybe see for future users, for future companies that are using formbricks, we might have a different feature set for them. So I guess doing a triaging or doing like a brainstorming on which clients are going to come in the future, like thinking that SSO is obviously a feature that enterprises would like more than others. So I think that that's something to consider. Like who do you want your product to use, how and what can you charge for in these kind of environments? Becausee I mean the enterprise usage of unknown open source projects are not another thing that are happening anytime soon unless they're also like fully controlled.
And I think an ad with a SaaS it would be easier like if you would do the hosting because then you can say like okay, for like that much traffic, it's free, for that much traffic it becomes payable. But like as your unique identifier is that you can host it yourself, you cannot see any of the traffic stuff and any of the user numbers. So that's kind of a, a no go in this area. So it's interesting to see. One other thing of course that I found really frustrating working in open source in Microsoft is that we created open source projects and then we had hardly any outside contribution.
And I think the reason was that first of all they thought like why should I work for free for Microsoft? Or a lot of people were like hey, this is Microsoft, I'm not good enough to actually compete with the people anyways. And it was really frustrating for me internally because I had a team of, of four people and people expected Microsoft to have like engineers sitting around that do nothing. They just wait for a thing to do. And that's not the case.
You had to fight for every single engineer to get onto your project as well. And especially if it's a non proffitable project for a company like Microsoft, it was really tricky to get internal people as well. So do you have any outside contribution already or is this mostly A thing that you, the six of you are putting together because that's another bit like that people put effort in from the outside and then when you start making money with it, it would just be fair to do some share of that. And how would you do that? So we have and had outside contributions from day one.
And that's one thing that I really loved about starting up in open source. Since with like closed source software as a service, it's always a struggle to like get your first customer, get some feedback and work like work on, improve on that. But with open source it was like even with the hobby project I just put out and didn't really do any promotion or didn't really post it anywhere people found it on GitHub, people reached out to me, raised issues on features they would love to have, bugs that they have and even raised pull requests themselves and started developing features that they would love to see. And so that's also when we transition that to form bricss was something that we try to keep up and also encourage. So we always try to find good ways how to motivate outside contributors to do more contributions to raise issues.
We experimented a lot with different like bug bounty system, different points ranks that they go up once they contribute more. We always contributed or participated in haktoberfest like an open source festival that happens every, every October and the. Yeah, that's definitely one of the great things of open source that and that definitely helped formbricks a lot get like more stable, more secure and also that we know what kind of features the community care about. But also there's also like a slight dark side to that is that if anyone can make contributions or like if you write a ticket and some developer says hey, I would like to take that up, you don't know is this like a good developer or not? Maybe he just like maybe takes a day to solve it, maybe it takes three weeks.
And even if they then raise the polull request, you don't know how good the code is, how many iterations, like how many loops you need to go over that code to improve it. And maybe in the end it would have been easier to just develop it yourself. But there are like the majority of developers are pretty good and we found all of our full time employees, they were previous contributors in formone bricks. And once we hired we said like, hey, we are hiring and they applied and we like without even doing an interview, we already know they know our code base, they write good code. And so also like the first day when they started There wasn no big onboarding or hey, we show you what the solution looks like from just day one on.
They got tasked, they worked on and features they developed. And so yeah, I think that's one of the great things about open source that it is so easy and that there's kind of not a real boundary between who is like employed, who contributes. And also even if there's a contributor and he does good work and he isn't looking for a job right now, we're also reaching out to them, say hey, we're planning this big feature also. Would you like to work on that? You could also get like let's say $500 if you develop that.
And that's also way how we can more flexible scale the whole development capacity. We, we have our need and form bricks. That makes me really happy because that's exactly how I sell open source to companies. I say like if people already know your product, they can hit the ground running on the first day. They basically know the thing, there's no onboarding needed, you already talked to them.
And that's also advice that I give to people that want to contribute. Like the way you behave yourself in pull requests and in comments and in basically reviews is actually telling me more of what you could be as an employee later on from my company than your code. Like the code quality is of course important, but it's actually more important how you embrace the whole idea of a iterative approach and like getting feedback and sometimes changing your mind as well of like this is how it's supposed to be done rather than like the rest of the project is written this way. No, you cannot put react into it because we don't need it yet kind of attitude. So I think that's something that is really exciting me that it works for you.
One thing I found is that a lot of people underestimate the amount of like community management that you have to do and like pull requests and issues. And I mean in my case with a huge project in a large company, of course there was 90% spam. There was like lots and lots of issues that were filed that were unreadable or like people trying to get malware in or people trying to getot promoting their stuff in. And I think that's a big issue. Andeed the exact backdoor showed that it can even be a long thing that people are a great maintainer for a year and then they put malware into your project and you actually don't see it.
So do you have somebody in community management already or is it still in the case where it's not that much coming in that it's not really worthwhile doing that investment yet. I would phrase it differently, like we're such a small team where we benefit a lot of doing it or benefit a lot by doing it ourselves if we would like. For me it is very helpful to get in touch with all the people trying out formbricks, try to host that maybe run into issues with that, talk about the features that they would like, love to see form bricks since that's then the knowledge I could use to improve the product. If someone else do it, it would, they can still write it down, but this would open up a completely new process. And at the moment we don't have so much or like too much community engagement.
It piles up if you don't do it regularly. But at the moment we do this like every day. We have also community duty in our team like every week rerotate like who is responsible for the community. So every developer also gets in touch with the customers, get to know where, where the issues are at the moment. So yeah, this works pretty well for us.
And also spam isn't really an issue of course since it's an open source project. I think we are much more, we attract much more people trying out their like security researcher skills. But this essentially I think is a good thing since I think we, we're now getting in the stage where we pitch to like pitch form bricks to our larger enterprises and they also do security checks and pen tests and, and so on on formbricks and currently with the pen test they run formworks is pretty secure and that's also thanks to all the like hobby security researchers that over the past few years tried to, yeah, DDoS or find issues in the whole auth system or API keys and so on. I can't even imagine working on WordPress. That must be an absolute, I mean that's like the most attacked thing on this planet.
And it's sometimes like 15, 16 year old php code that nobody looked at for month and month. So that's a tricky bit there. One of the things that I found interesting as well as you said that like you find people who do like more security things, you find people that do testing for you, you find people that contribute in code. What would you say is a great opportunity for anybody who wants to get started in open source to contribute at a project like yours? What are the things that I most appreciated?
I guess of course submitting code is a great thing, but what are things that you Will spend a lot of time on that. You would love the community to take off your hands.
So like when you start to contribute, like also giving a star on GitHub, I think it's the first level of contributing since also the whole star metric it something that like it's like when somebody'very happy about 500 likes on Facebook, if people still use Facebook. It's the same with, with GitHub you kind of can as an open source project break about how many stars you have. And this also helps the, helps the whole system or the whole project mature and track or get attention. But then I think the most important thing would be writing issues and also finding bugs.
This, this isn't so hard and it's there. GitHub has this like great process, standardized process how to report bugs, how to write them down. And I think yeah, that's the ones that helps us the most because of course we try to keep the system bug free. But as a small team it's. And also in software projects in general, I think it's not possible to have no bugs at all.
So this is mostly much more valuable for us than writing a pull request for a new feature. But then the second level of contributing is finding a bug and then fixing it yourself. So that's. Then that would be my dream. When I see in the morning somebody open an issue for a buck and end as the first comment they say like I fix that in that PR and then look at the PR and merge it and I don't really need to care about that bug anymore.
Yeah, I think the dream of an open source maintainer. Yeah, that's definitely a great thing. I mean especially it's also a good exercise for you what you would do as a professional developer later on. Like I got into the habit of actually filing bucs and filing issues for myself and then starting to fix the thing because then first of all it's nagging me because it's on my to do list. And secondly, like there's a track record that it has been fixed.
So in the next review we don't need to warder about if it is still in flux or not. You said at the beginning that the big push at the beginning was hacker use and product hunt. I mean product hunt got into a bad reputation lately that it's very much gained with like AI content and like all kinds of stuff. So do you think the honeymoon period there is over? So it's really hard to stick out now than you did before or is it something that you still follow and you look at other projects being posted there, I think Product Hunt is still relevant.
It's of course very, very hype driven. So now it's a lot of AI projects. Like one, two years ago it was a lot of crypto and web three projects. I think it's just like everything in hype is just also very popular on Product Hunt but also it gives you a lot of spotlight, especially when you are able to rank higher on that given day. But it depends on the target group.
So with Product Hunt we have seen with the, with the first launch we did it for Product Hunt which was in a free and open source survey solution which was framed as an open source Typeform alternative. And that worked very well with the whole Product Hunt community. And then we did launches later on which are more focused on like the experience Management or self hostable experience management solution for corporations, for enterprises. And we've seen that that didn't really resonate with the like target group of Product Hunt anymore. So those are mainly marketers, indie hackers trying to find new, cool, interesting products to try out.
And so you need a product that we works well with that community. You need to frame it in a way that it resonates well. But I still think it's a good way to get attention from all sites. Also every time we do a product hut launch, VCs reach out to us. So it's also a platform, they scan to see what kind of new interesting startups pop up.
So what advice would you give somebody like, I mean you said like you accidentally stumbled over the GitHub accelerator and kind of like was surprised that they would say, was it something that you would advise people to do? Is it something where you think it's going to be harder for people to get into? But what kind of homework can people do to actually get easier into that kind of world? Is it something that the product needs to have like a good pitch deck or is it more like a being open to communication with people? How hard was it to get into and what would you think makes it easier for people to get into these kind of environments now?
Yeah, it kind of depends what the goal is. But I think like for example if for the GitHub accelerator was, was an awesome experience for us, but I think it was also that they liked us initially. It was also due to the traction that we already got, the community traction. So the good community work that we did, the successful Product Hunt and Hacker News launch like then the stars on GitHub that we already had. But of course we Tried to apply it for it.
We could have also said yeah, that's mainly for more mature products. Also one like NUX J'FOR example was one of the projects that were also part of that accelerator BGE and they were like much further than we were at that point but we still were confident that maybe we can get in. So like the big advice I think would be to just try to get up, get out of your comfort zone, apply for the things that you think matters and also just try to get in touch with like minded people like for us in open source projects, get in touch with more other open source funds and open source projects. They are also very open to communicate. The same is true for like other developers or other like contributors, companies, startups, whatever you build, yeah just get in touch with them, have a chat and then I think this really the network that you build really boosts everything that you're ab building, building.
Well that's a wonderful end to this podcast as well because we had a chat and we talked about simple single minded things that we actually both shared. So I'm very happy that you had the success that you have already. It's going to be interesting to see what the next steps are. So we chatted about this a bit earlier. So I mean I'm very happy to see a lot of people finding a goal to see where their company should go, like what size they want to have and put a cap on that.
So is this something that you're wondering about as well right now? Like is there sometimes a feeling that you think oh my God, I started something and it's getting too big for me to control or is it like give me all your money and I want to be as big as possible? I think that's definitely something or it's like the mindset is something we, we are struggling a bit with. We are like two farmers from Germany and trying. We are building a startup mainly in the us we are re raising money in the US and you need to sell a much bigger dream where we sometimes wonder if we are we are the right people to fulfill or to fill up that dream that, that we just pitched.
But yeah we started going down that route. We still think it's an amazing journey. We learn a lot and I think a little bit of self doubt and trying to question the things once in a while helps you to find your path and yeah help you, helps you improve in that journey that you take. Excellent. Thank you so much.
It was lovely. So where to reach you? What do you want from people? How many people are going to hire in the next month. Interestingly we are currently closing our seat financing round so we will definitely higher likelh 3 people more but yeah please check out formbricks on GitHub GitHub.com formbricks try to contribute give us a star if you find any bugs raise an issue.
If you would love to see any features raise a feature request for that or if you just like to reach out to me, you can always shoot me an email to mattyformbrs.com. excellent. This was copy with developers with Martin N from formbricss and yeah as you said we take a look at it it's on GitHub. I mean it helped hosting your on GitHub I guess as well rather than other places. But yeah good to see that you're in a journey where you want to keep see people safe, allow them to host their own things in a market that originally was just very much a SaaS.
So if you want to hear more about this, you probably see Matty at our event again as well in July. So I wouldn't be surprised if you'll be around there again. And thanks for that. This was wonderful. Awesome.
Thank you.