When I Said I Would Start an Open Source Business

Will it work? The reaction was overwhelming. It took quite a long time to convince the most difficult person to persuade, ‘myself’, and the questions were like, “What’s the item?” and reactions like “That’s interesting.” There were also responses like, “Does it really have to be open source?”

The item is a common, ordinary video editing software. With SaaS that generates short-form content and free video editing programs readily available, the market is almost a red ocean. But wait, it’s never been made open source before? Ah, this is it! And so, the video editing software I was developing was released as open source.

It was released with a poor explanation and a single small screenshot, without even a demo video, and the reaction was good. Of course, it was the developers’ reaction, not the market’s. Most of the responses were positive, saying it showed remarkable results in the frontend sector flooded with SaaS. Usually, such reactions are proportional to the number of stars, and since I haven’t done much marketing yet, I’ve gotten about 170. Of course, the first goal was 100, so I succeeded in achieving that, but the second goal of 1k is still far off.

The BM is AI auto-subtitles. It is configured to offer both self-hosted and cloud options, and initially, I plan to go with a high price but gradually lower it.

Honestly, I don’t know if this will work. Open source is a kind of belief, and as long as there is enough money for basic living expenses and operating costs, that’s enough. Rather than scaling the business, I think it’s necessary for many people to empathize with my vision and for numerous developers to do business with open source, breaking the market share of companies operating with closed source. Thus, I believe a change is needed to bring back consumer utility and sovereignty.

And the dream of building big tech with open source. I still have it.

backup from https://disquiet.io/@hhj/makerlog/오픈소스-비즈니스를-하겠다고-했을때