Once you have steady adoption, your next challenge is converting engagement into revenue — without betraying the spirit that made your project succeed.
Awareness → Adoption → Activation → Advocacy → Conversion
Conversion happens when those advocates realize that your commercial offering (managed cloud, enterprise features, or SLAs) saves them time and risk.
At Confluent, the founders of Kafka realized that open-source users didn’t want a new feature, they wanted less operational pain. The managed service became their business model.
Diagram: “OSS Flywheel: Adoption → Credibility → Revenue”
(Show adoption metrics feeding product credibility, driving enterprise demand, funding further OSS investment.)
Every OSS company eventually faces the question: how much to open, and how much to monetize?
Three proven models:
Your job as a founder is to choose the model that aligns with your users’ needs. If they value control, open core works. If they value convenience, cloud wins.
