Open Core Indie Hackers.
Hi Indie Hackers - it's been a minute since I've posted here.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the best approach for technical founders is to build open-source with premium offerings, the Laravel and Databricks model.
The sequencing feels quite natural. Product Market Fit can be easily measured through adoption, and you'll find out really quickly if the project is useful. If it is, there are ways to support developers with premium offerings later on down the line.
I believe this is called "open core"?
Who are some interesting people to interact with in the open core space?
Who should I listen to who has bad experiences/lessons learnt from open core?
I don't know anyone who's done this, but I fell into this model a long time ago. It was probably around 10 years ago I created my first Wordpress plugin and added to the Wordpress plugins directory for free. I didn't think much of it at the time but over the years I've had nothing but 5 star reviews and users asking for a paid version with some additional features (Both in the plugin page comments and to me personally). I finally decided to take that next step and built a service out of it. So it's definitely a good way to start out.
So far I haven't had any negative experiences and it's certainly something I would do again if I had another idea.