In a traditional startup, discovery starts with customer interviews. In OSS, it starts with conversations in public: GitHub issues, Discord channels, and Reddit threads. Every question, every bug report, every pull request is a data point.
Your goal in this phase is to learn who your users are, what they’re doing with your code, and why they care.
Community means co-creation. Your users help you discover your market:
The most successful OSS founders don’t see community as marketing. They see it as product R&D.
Every OSS founder wears four hats early on:
At Harness, Jyoti Bansal built a community by publishing every insight about software delivery he wished he’d had at AppDynamics. By giving knowledge away, he built trust — and eventually, adoption.
Diagram: “OSS Adoption Curve — From Lighthouse to Mainstream”
(Visualize Innovators → Early Adopters → Early Majority → Late Majority, showing OSS examples like Kubernetes, Kafka, Terraform.)
