The Business of Open Source26 Mars 2025

How a Rebrand Increased Sales with Lukas Gentele

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Lukas Gentele, the CEO and co-founder of LoftLabs.

Here’s some of the things we covered:

There are many open source projects at LoftLabs. We talked about what the team did differently the second time round, when they’d had the experience of creating the first project under their belt, and why they continued creating additional projects after that.
How they make roadmap decisions to decide what goes in the OSS versus what goes in the enterprise edition
How they thought about the benefits to the business from open sourcing vCluster, the second project they released, and whether or not the theory about how it would benefit the business ended up being correct.
Whether or not open code is necessary for community building, and why. In particular, we talked about the difference in how people feel ‘ownership’ of open source projects when they contribute to them.
The pros and cons of building different brands around your project, your product and your company; and of having different brands around your different projects. We talked about this a lot; LoftLabs has a different company brand from any of the products or projects, but they discovered that if the project and product do not have the same brand, people get so confused that they ultimately do not buy.

If you need to figure out how to brand your project and product, you might want to work with me. If you want an opportunity to talk with other founders about branding, community building, and more, you should join us at Open Source Founders Summit May 19th and 20th in Paris.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(279)

A Product Strategy Framework for Going from Closed to Open Source

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Kris Zyp, SVP of engineering at HarperDB, in the third and final episode in the series about how Harper went from a closed-source company t...

18 Aug 31min

Giving your Users a Well-Lit Path with Matt Watson

In today’s episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Matt Watson, CEO of Fullscale, about a number of topics related to product development and how AI is changing that. Let’s start with a q...

10 Aug 34min

Interviewing your Target Customers to Accelerate Product-Market Fit

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talk with Julien Verlaguet, the CEO of Skiplabs. Julien is a programming language guy, and we talked about what it means to maintain an open source programm...

3 Aug 37min

Making AI an Opportunity with Joshua Drake

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Joshua Drake, president and CTO of Command Prompt, about business management, bootstrapping versus taking investment, and AI, open source ...

30 Juli 40min

From Closed to Open: Shortening Sales Cycles with Stephen Goldberg

This week on The Business of Open Source, I chatted with Stephen Goldberg, co-founder of Harper, about the process of taking Harper from a closed-source software company to a open source company. I al...

6 Juli 33min

Does AI Make Open Core Models More Difficult? with Sam Alba

Today on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Sam Alba, co-founder of Mendral, formerly of Dagger, and the first hire at Docker. We talked a lot about about how AI is changing the developer tools ...

2 Juli 39min

Closed to Open Source Series: Doing Open Source "Right" with Ethan Arrowood

One of the myths that swirl around the open source company ecosystem is that all open source companies started as an open source project that then suddenly got traction, and followed by the founders f...

22 Juni 40min

The Value of Code is Dropping to Zero with Yann Lechelle

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Yann Lechelle, Executive President of :Probabl.Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation was about whether or not there is a r...

15 Juni 42min