300 stars on GitHub. What business could I build?
Last night I woke up at 2am to discover that my open source project has gathered 300 GitHub stars in the 3 days since somebody posted it on Hacker News. It was on the front page for HN for a while in the top 10 posts and has gathered 100 stars per day since then.
The project is called Fleck and it makes Bash scripting less painful by putting a nicer language on top of Bash. At a rate of 100 stars per day I seem to have hit a nerve with a subset of developers who do a lot of shell scripting and find Bash difficult or annoying to use.
So what micro-business ideas can you think of that I could build around this small success? What further value could I bring to people who find this useful, that they would pay for?
Looking for creative ideas, especially things that have worked for open source projects in the past.
Thank you! 🙏
Sorry for being a naysayer but I doubt you can build a business on that project specifically. It will help you in terms of reputation, networking, and marketing in general but selling tools to developers is difficult enough as it as.
Developers (or their managers) often even refuse to pay a measly ~€500 for something as obvious as an IDE that makes them much more productive.
A LISP that helps with writing Bash scripts more efficiently? No chance, sorry.
Naysaying is good. Thanks for your input!
This really depends on your personality. But if it was me I'd put all of your effort into building this further and creating a community around it. I would use this as a reputation builder for yourself. Be bold and make some strong opinions, and write about them(on twitter or a blog).
I think others are right, about developers being cheap and hard to sell too. But 300 stars in 3 days is really impressive! If you are up for it, I think this could really jump start you into a career like Wes Bos or Scott Allen.
If possible, you should follow up with HN commenters or people who starred the repo to learn more about their pain points and why Fleck is valuable to them. If there's a real business opportunity, you'll likely find it there.
Looking at it now, an option that comes to mind would be a service that converts existing bash scripts to fleck. Since people seem to really like fleck more than regular bash scripts, maybe they would pay to convert their old scripts so they only have to deal with using fleck in the future. I feel like most open source projects make money by offering a hosted version of their project. Not sure if that's applicable here though. I guess you could provide a web based editor where people write scripts in fleck and then if they pay a fee you'll convert it to bash and they can download it. Cool concept though, best of luck.
building on the ideas above, could possibly sell an IDE or an IDE plugin that does Fleck natively?
Another path might be along teaching it, if it become a better way to do things, people want to learn what it's about, might start with simple youtube videos that you can monetise and might grow to books and paid courses..
I believe you can also get a few pennies writing about it like in medium..
(these would probably need a ton of traction to produce something meaningful)
Can also just allow monetary contributions with some service.
GL
Conversion service is a very interesting idea, thank you.
Good idea with following up on HN. I did some of that and most of the things people raised became issues that I fixed. Will check back again.
Why lisp? 😅
"So what micro-business ideas can you think of that I could build around this small success? What further value could I bring to people who find this useful, that they would pay for?"
How about Clojure consulting services? Compared to more popular languages, there aren't a ton of jobs in Clojure, but given the niche your project appeals to, odds are decent that the people who use this tool are working on Clojure code and might want some additional help.
Great job building something valuable in the open.
Another IH'er built postwoman and has had massive success product and adoption wise but is still thinking about monetization.
You could go opencore where you sell a subset of features on a non-open license.
Do really explore dual licensing where you can get some of the value you have created.
I built OpenOrgs specifically for projects like yours where lots of people can contribute and get rewarded , while you can collect funds via subscriptions.
Do have a look at https://openorgs.co
I was thinking teaching as well, as @hatkyinc previously mentioned. Maybe a a couple of free videos to pique their interest and then an option to buy some more advanced topics and either try selling them individually or as a pack.
Good job on getting your product out there.