TL;DR
- Investors don’t fund OSS usage; they fund OSS momentum.
- Tell the community flywheel story.
- Replace ARR with evidence of pull.
Traditional SaaS metrics — ARR, CAC, LTV — don’t apply in early OSS stages. You might have millions of downloads but $0 in revenue. That’s fine if you can prove adoption, engagement, and community strength.
What investors look for
- Adoption metrics: GitHub stars, weekly downloads, active installations.
- Community engagement: contributors, Slack members, event attendance.
- Commercial signals: referenceable design partners using your code in production.
- Momentum: release cadence, inbound partnership interest, brand recognition.
At MongoDB, early fundraising focused on the explosive usage curve. When investors saw hundreds of companies were already building on it, they knew monetization was a question of “when,” not “if.”
Series A checklist for OSS founders
- 10K+ active users
- 3–5 design partners in production
- 10+ community contributors outside the core team
- A clear path from adoption to monetization (e.g., enterprise support, hosted cloud)
Diagram: “Community Flywheel Story”
(Visualize contribution → improvement → credibility → enterprise adoption → revenue → reinvestment.)
