12 Startups in 12 Months (Open Source Edition)
My goal for the next 12 months is to launch 12 startups and release the source code for each startup under an MIT open source license. First startup launching Wednesday, July 27th!
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It sounds great, but is it really doable? Why not make less but better startups/apps? If something works, go all-in on that :)
But, nevertheless good luck on this journey Anthony!
Most of the people who have done the 12 startups in 12 months challenge have not completed the challenge but a few of them have been able to pivot into successful businesses. The ultimate goal is a successful business.
One thing that Jon Yongfook mentioned when doing the challenge was "You give your products time to breathe". I really like that concept because when launching a business, time to grow is an important factor. As you are waiting for one to grow, you can focus on another one.
I like to think of it like planting seeds. The more seeds you plant, the greater chance you have of a successful harvest.
I'm definitely nervous about the quick turn around on the projects, but it is forcing me to think about the most important parts of the launch.
Interesting. What's your thought process behind making those startups open source?
For eg, I've seen some founders think of "open source" as a marketing channel. By releasing your code on Github, you make your project/code searchable. And despite what many people say, Github is a powerful search engine with (prob) millions of searches each month.
Plausible is a big part of my inspiration and how they are competing with a large market incumbent with open source - a few of my ideas will be competing with well-established free services that offer a solution that does not work well for certain niches.
I think open source increases the trust of users (especially when coming from a free service), it does help with marketing since like you said Github is a powerful search engine.
Aside from increasing marketing reach and trust, there are a few other reasons. I'm not real happy with the current direction of web development. I think many of the principles of openness, the semantic web, and separation of concerns that were being heavily promoted between 2005-2010 are being lost with modern frameworks and modern business plans. I would like to help provide examples of a different approach to web development than what most people are taught today.
The startups being open source also offer a fallback plan for me. With these startups, I'm going to also be building an open source web framework. If all 12 startups fail, I should have a solid web framework with 12 examples of services built with the framework that anybody could checkout and use for inspiration or understanding of how to build with the framework.
If none of the startups work out (I don't think that will be the case but it is possible), I could pivot to promoting my web framework and offer services and support for that framework.
Ultimately, I'm hoping for success, but if I fail, there will be other backup plans where I can repurpose all the work I put in.
Not sure what your tech stack is, but I am currently working on an open source authentication server: https://auth.vulpo.dev. It comes with a pre-built UI for react apps, however it currently does not support server rendered applications.
I ended up writing the server because in 2019 I also planed to build a few apps and thought to myself that at least auth is something that all those apps have in common, so I would make sense to create something that is reusable.
Looks like an interesting service. I'm going to be writing vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS so it won't be react based.
One quick note, for open source projects, the Github README is the first thing I always check out to get a feel for the status of the project. I would recommend copying over some of the guide info (https://auth.vulpo.dev/guides) to the main README.
Publish the list of 12+ ideas of this challenge
I would rather keep those private until I'm launching the startup - I don't see any benefit in announcing idea number 12 that is 12 months away from launching.
I like the idea of common login, billing, etc. and understand why you might not want to open source that piece (but having a stand-in login feature that is part of the open source makes sense as well).
Good luck with your efforts...
Thanks, I appreciate it!
My plan for the startup projects is to use a custom web framework that I'm building from scratch so all/majority of the code I will be using will be completely mine for the individual startups.
For the common login and billing, I'm initially building that on top of Laravel using their OAuth code and writing custom billing code. It is all MIT licensed code, but I'm not fully comfortable committing to open sourcing that portion.
I know other startups have moved to more restrictive licenses (for example, Plausible moved away from the MIT license due to concerns about copycats). I'm a big fan of the MIT license and my initial thoughts are that copycats shouldn't be too much of a problem due to first mover advantage and overall project vision. However, I don't want to have to learn that lesson the hard way and find out that it is an issue. By keeping the billing and common login code private, it makes it a little more difficult for copycats while at the same time still gives full functionality for anyone who wants to run the software themselves.
I guess I'll see how it goes - thanks for the well-wishes!