Forem: Tomer Barnea

Open Source Redesigned

Tomer Barnea — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 14:57:32 +0000

I had the pleasure of talking to Alex Barashkov, CEO @ PixelPoint, a Design studio focusing mainly on open-source products.

TLDR; We talked about what’s trending in design, why it isn’t easy to find designers, how open-source is different than other products, and how to look bigger than you are.

Difficulty with designers

When talking about sales, marketing, and even insurance designs, it’s a well-known term for almost every designer because they have seen it somewhere in their life. But when talking to designers about “Docker,” “Kubernetes,” “Lambda Observability,” and so on, that’s something that starts to sound like Gibbreish even to senior designers. At the end of the day, you can teach them what it is, but they won’t understand it intensely because they are unaware of the technical world and won’t be able to provide you with additional insights and understanding of the end-user. That’s where PixelPoint shines. Words like CI/CD and Websockets are familiar to them.

Open-source is different than the others.

When talking about open-source design, it usually revolves around the community, issues, pull requests, and feature requests. Iterations are generally faster because it’s living on the community feedback. We can often see the community members contributing to the marketing website or the app without discussing it with the designers beforehand. After that, it will be redesigned by the designers.

What’s familiar with most open-source products

Many developers usually value code and architecture as “pure” open-source, and every piece of material outside of it, such as design, marketing, and sales, will stain it. That’s why most of the open-source products we see out there look like a simple HTML pages with links and documentation. And while that might be ok, many of the other times, they miss one of the essential parts - UX. Think about what it means to go to an open-source website and look for more than 20 seconds to find the Github link or the Documentation.

Starting from design ⛔️

We can also see some open-source founders starting from design instead of code/open-source. Instead of actually working in an open-source way, they go and start with the marketing website, creating landing pages when they actually focus on the community and their Github project. When talking to developers, first thing first, you should always talk about the technical aspect behind it.

Look bigger than you are

Having an excellent design makes you look bigger. We had a big customer turning us a few weeks back and said the website looks so neat, and how big are we? And we actually said we started six months ago. Perception creates reality.

Finding good designers

Unfortunately, in today’s world, finding a senior designer is not an easy task as most senior designers would probably look to work at more prominent companies (After raising a B round). So your best option is to take a senior designer as an advisor in the company or hire an agency.

What to put on the marketing website

One of the biggest trends we can see out there today is “dark mode,” 3d, and gradients and animations. Those are all fantastic things you can add to your website. They are not mandatory. They can help by providing more context of what’s going on on your website and attracting visitors to spend more time at your website. However, based on developers’ feedback, what is really crucial is having good documentation and code snippets on the main page.

I like to play a game I call “find the API,” where I see how quickly I can make my way from the home page to the documentation. I don’t always win - DuVander, Adam. Developer Marketing Does Not Exist

Novu animation about notifications that give more context

P.S I would really appriciate if you can help us with a star on Github
https://github.com/novuhq/novu

How to raise funds for an open-source company 💵

Tomer Barnea — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 13:22:00 +0000

I had a pleasure talking to Igor Kotua VC @ RunaCapital, a VC company that invests mainly in Open-Source Companies.

TLDR; We talked about what kind of products are suitable for open-source, open-source companies vs. B2B SaaS, Some open-source investments, and Igor library maintainer of Awesome open-source alternatives to SaaS. You can listen (and subscribe 🚀) to it here:

What kind of products can be open-sourced?

Libraries

First thing first, Everything that is some kind of a library or a low-code architecture level is suited for open-source as it is the basis of open-source. It’s usually something that is used by engineering or a highly technical people. That’s pure open-source, and there is no commercial thing around it.

Databases and Infrastructure

The second type is highly technical tools such as Databases, and Infrastructure tools, most of these tools are open-source and mostly free. We can find many great ones such as MySQL, Nginx, and Nest.js. They usually benefit from enterprise support.

SaaS turned Open-Source 🚀

The third type we can see that is emerging in the last years are products such as Novu, Medusa, and PostHog that can initially offer a closed-code SaaS solution. They merit from direct connection with the engineers and benefit from being connected to the open-source community. Many of those products are not super technical and can actually be a source for junior developers to come and contribute their first PR. You can find open-source solutions compared to SaaS in Igor Awesome open-source alternatives to SaaS. Make sure you give him a star ⭐️

Monetizing open-source products 💰

Over the years, we saw open-source evolving a lot with different kinds of monetization options. I will try to touch on some of them here. Most of the monetization methods listed below are for open-core solutions, which means that all the code is public. We will have a new article soon about open-foundation, which is another form of open source where some of the code is open-sourced, and some of it is not.

Sponsorships

This is kind of the core of open-source libraries with no monetization or commercial use restrictions. That’s the purest aspect of open-source.

Enterprise Support / Usage and Commercial use

This is the de-facto way to monetize open-source products. We can find companies such as Nest.js and Next.js offering enterprise solutions. That’s something that we could see many companies do in the past. Today, we see more companies offering the next step of open source evolution - Cloud Solutions.

Cloud Solutions with SaaS offering

Many big companies, such as MongoDB, used to offer only enterprise solutions, but today we can see a shift into Could Solutions such as MongoDB Atlas. Cloud solutions offer a few types of options, mainly SSO, audits, logs, and hosting. Founders realized that many of the solutions out there are hard to deploy and maintain by engineers and require a devops team focusing on scalability and observability. In Novu You can find a similar offer for a hosted solution. The great thing is that it's giving smaller companies solutions for their needs with a relatively low price per month (most of them free up to some point).

These days we can also find great frontend hosting solutions such as GatsbyJS cloud, Netlify, Vercel, and Heroku that are great for both hosting, deploying, and monitoring apps in a few clicks.

Releasing features faster 🌬

There are more and more products getting into the market every day that need to deliver a lot of features. Sometimes those things become super complex, and the main thing they usually don’t have is time. A lot of those parts are engineers issues that can be democratized by open-source solutions. You can use Okta for the identity solution, Add Auth0 / Hanko for authentication, and then use Permit for authorization and you have easily saved thousands of development hours.

What metrics do VCs look at when they invest in Open Source Products?

There are many types of open-source companies, and many of the investment metrics are similar between SaaS and open-source, such as the founder's background, market size, and go-to-market strategy, but the one thing that is usually very common among open-source companies is that they are waiting for a significant adoption and an extensive user base before they start to monetize their product. So if in B2B companies, the primary metric is revenue than in open-source companies it is adoption by engineers and the community.

Other metrics VC are looking for are

Contributors

How many developers are out there trying to help you with the product, and how valuable is their contribution - Is it a one-time thing of typo fixing? Or is it an ongoing contribution for an extended period of time? Did they come to put a stamp or to be a community member?

Stars

Stars are not an accurate metric for adoption (Developers can star your product without using it), but it’s kind of a metric that shows the stage of the company. Kinda the same as ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) - Not giving a lot of information but showing the stage of the company.

Community Issues

Can you see a growth in issues every month? That’s a good thing, it means that the community is growing and the product is getting more adoption.

In conclusion

At the end of the day, the main question is whether it’s a product that lives in as a community base only, or can it be a big company that generates money. We can find big open-source products over Github that haven’t yet found a way to monetize their services even though the product is fantastic.

It’s not expected from founders to gain revenue over the first years, but VCs do expect founders to show a strategic plan for doing so.

I hope you have managed to learn a little bit about COSS (Commercial Open Source Startups).

Novu - the first open-source notification architecture

Just a quick background about us. Novu is the first open-source notification infrastructure. We help managing all the product notifications. It can be In-App (the bell icon like you have in Facebook - Websockets), Emails, SMSs, and so on. I would be super happy if you could give us a star! And let me also know in the comments ❤️

https://github.com/novuhq/novu

Core Team vs. Contributors

Tomer Barnea — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:29:14 +0000

You can to it listen here 🚀:

Just a quick background about us

Novu is the first open-source notification infrastructure. We basically help to manage all the product notifications. It can be In-App (the bell icon like you have in Facebook), Emails, SMSs and so on. Help us with a star ⭐️🚀
https://github.com/novuhq/novu

Starting out

Growing the Novu community started with an objective to “gather” a community around solving a common problem of lacking multi-channel notification infrastructure for products. This means that people were already familiar with the product because they had a the same problem, and Novu stepped in to provide a solution. So essentially, we gave our community a platform to work on solving problems they experienced in their work.

Validation

At Novu, we quickly realized that we needed quick validation from the engineering community to see if they understood the problem and the solution we were building. This was a necessary process because keep in mind that notification infrastructure exists in almost every product, but usually, the developer had to program it from scratch every time.

Community Bump

When we started building Novu as open-source, we saw a steady increase in community engagement, People joining our Discord channel, more stars on Github, the community willingly creating issues and making pull requests, and much more. Another observation we made was the community had both junior and senior engineers. Junior engineers were mainly looking for an open-source community and senior engineers who had the task of implementing notifications in their platform.

Create a Solution That Solves Problems That Both Junior and Senior Engineers Experience

The engineering world had evolved rapidly since the 1970s when the idea of software engineering started. Now, it's estimated that the number of developers is doubling every 5-7 years, and the transition from junior engineer to senior engineer roughly takes five years. So at any given time, 50-60% of developers are not seniors. So when building a solution, it’s necessary to consider these factors and create a solution for junior and senior developers.

Makin' it easy

We have decided that Javascript is one of the easiest languages to get into. We have decided to build a solution with both frontend and backend frameworks that are trendy right now (Node.js, React), so we can attract many juniors looking for a community to learn these tech stacks.

Ultimately, as Novu grows, more senior developers will join our community, especially when issues become more complex and require professional experience to solve.

Include Your Community in the Software Development Process

Another reason why growing a community through open communication is essential is that it gives your community context to what you're building. It can be easy to assume that everyone has the same context as a company owner over a product. So, developers and potential users get an opportunity to be part of the development process.

Troubles in paradise

Open communication also comes with challenges, especially when tackling issues. Some issues require more experience to resolve, but because we are open source, you may find a junior developer picking a topic that may be too difficult for them to handle. So we end up with unresolved problems or issues that take too much time to resolve. To overcome this challenge, we do the following:

Create an onboarding process for contributors, where we assign issues to developers who've demonstrated they have ample knowledge of a particular issue we've posted.
We provide a generic onboarding manual to guide contributors on how to install our software, test it, create issues on Github, the pull request process, and so on.

We also get to understand our member's skills and competencies, so we can, in turn, provide a better community experience by guiding them through the onboarding stage and including developers in the development process.

Working Together

In Novu, our core team communicates and engages with the community on the same channel - We have only one channel for engineering, and it's public.

Our team also possesses soft skills (not just technical skills) to mentor new community members and be mentored.

Recognize Contributor Effort Publicly

Appreciating your contributors boosts morale and recognizes their effort. In addition, contributors give us their time and effort for free, so respecting them fosters a strong community. To achieve this, we created a page on our website to showcase our contributors. We categorize their contributions according to the number of contributions they make and award medals (bronze, silver, and gold medals.) Developers can then use that information to demonstrate their skills to future employers, friends, and family. You can find the page here:
https://novu.co/contributors/

Instill Open Communication Policies

We decided to move our engineering teams to a public discord channel. This move fostered more trust and open communication within the community, leading to members sharing their expertise, helping each other, and improving Novu's software.

Furthermore, having an open communication policy lets people see the full range of questions posed in the discord channel. Again, our team is always on standby to help members by answering questions, providing feedback, giving advice, sharing resources, and so forth. This open communication creates a safe space for our community members to interact with each other without the fear of ridicule.

The Future of The Novu Community

Our vision is to have a "team connected to the community" instead of a “team separated from the community," meaning we operate as a cohesive unit where we interact with each other openly and can solve problems together.

Novu is a solution built for developers by developers. We value external contributors because they see new perspectives we may not be exposed to internally. At the same time, having a strong internal team gives the community structure and direction. With that in mind, we strive daily to align different ideas and skillsets to build the same product and community.

We are trying to make our core team and community one.
What should we do to become more transparent, helpful, and fun to work with? :)
Happy to hear about it in the comments.

Overcome Remote Working

Tomer Barnea — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 13:12:46 +0000

You can listen here 🚀

In this post, I will be talking about the nitty-gritty of remote working, what it entails, things you should know before you decide to make your company go remote, and a lot of other things.

To start with, a lot of people think a remote company basically means that all the employees are working remotely. They are not totally wrong. But it goes way beyond just that.

Working next to my bed

Our first company was an office space company which started from my bedroom. We eventually progressed from my bedroom to my living room and then to an actual office space. When we started, just like every other company, we didn’t think about remote working right away. We had to learn as we grew and then discovered what was best for us as a company.

The second company was also an office space company. We had team members from Israel and the United States. In that company, we had serious communication issues because of the time difference. Israel is about 7 hours ahead of New York. Usually, work starts by 9 am which is the local Israeli time, and around 2-3 pm the New York office would be up and then we would keep on working till about 10 pm. Trust me when I say it was so stressful. Since then, we started looking actively into remote working.

Recruiting remotely

Going from being an office space company to a fully remote or hybrid company requires a lot. It is quite challenging. If you own a company then you probably know what I mean. The recruitment process is not always easy, from hiring to eventually onboarding employees. Especially the onboarding process! Onboarding a new hire is a comprehensive process that involves integrating that employee with a company and its culture. It involves providing the new team member with the tools, resources, and necessary information for them to be a productive member of the team. When an employee is onboarded, you want to make sure that they become exposed to, and help them get a clear understanding of your company’s culture, policies, missions, and values. This is one crucial reason for employee onboarding. The moment an intended employee walks into your company, say for an interview, they start to get a sense of your company culture. It’s difficult to integrate an employee with your missions and goals as a company when your company is remote.

On the other hand, it has a lot of benefits. To mention a few, you’ll have access to different people from all over the world as you’re not restricted to your local geography. You also have the opportunity of working with amazing individuals that have hands-on experience that your company might need. In summary, you have the chance of working with people that you may not be privileged to work with if they had to converge at a physical office due to distance.

It’s a lot easier today than before

Today it’s becoming easier to be a remote company. There are technological innovations that allow for transition to a remote company to be made easy. Deel is an example of a platform that helps remote companies to hire remote contractors and employees from around the world. They help with the number of day-offs to be given, holidays, and so on. SwagUp is another platform that helps companies to ship whatever they want to wherever they want. As a remote or hybrid company, it’s important that you make sure your remote workers get their work equipment wherever they might be.

Challenges of remote working

You might face the inability of employees to create a meaningful connection with the other team members, some people can work for years without meeting. That’s one of the reasons we have created “all-hands” VR meetings, to allow employees to get more personal.

Since people are working in different time zones, it can sometimes feel like you are working for a whole day because you need to wait for other meetings.
Working from home can be quite depressing as it gets lonely, make sure that people are not getting depressed working remotely, and make sure you make active investments for the team to stay together and talk to each other. For example, organize VR meetings, invest in some game time, and other entertaining activities.
You should also emphasize physical connections (like meeting retreats) and remember to balance their work and personal life. It’s easy to get buried with work. There should be some sort of balance.

Office vs. Hybrid vs. Remote Working

If you love office culture, meaning that you like having your workers in the same space, then you’re better off doing that. If you don’t believe in remote working it’ll be difficult to put in a good amount of effort. Building a remote company, knowing fully well that you’re not fully invested in the idea may not be such a good idea.

In my opinion, it’s even better to become a remote company than a hybrid one. A hybrid company has some of its employees working at the office and the rest working remotely. If the employees at the physical office decide to hang out or do some sort of activity, remote workers would feel left out thinking they’re being neglected. This would eventually bring about bad or toxic company culture.

These are some of the things we considered at Novu before going fully remote.

That’s our typical Monday:

And this is a typical Jewish holiday:

Meet our team at Novu

Novu is the first open-source notification infrastructure that lets you
Focus on your core product by providing the best-in-class set of tools for
Engineering teams that seek to build product-to-customer communication
unlike building it in-house, which requires a lot of organizational effort.

Come and star us on GitHub 🚀 ⭐️

Building an open-source company in public

Tomer Barnea — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 14:34:19 +0000

One of the main core values of Novu is transparency with our community, team members, partners, and the industry around us.

Transparency isn’t something new, we’ve seen other companies do it such as Gitlab. The motion of building in public, Open Startup, and Open Telemetry is a part of a fresh movement, trying to make the world better by allowing more observability, accountability, and trust between companies and their surroundings.

What does it mean to build in public and how to do it?

Roughly speaking, you are trying to share everything that you can. That can be roadmaps, KPIs, revenue, or anything you choose.

While it’s not easy to become fully transparent, you can choose how transparent you want to be. Something is better than nothing. Even sharing a little makes you more accountable, keeps everything measurable gives you more confidence and allows you to communicate better with the world around you.

You could start by announcing that you're building in public, letting the community know. For example, some companies give daily or weekly updates about their numbers. Some take a more comprehensive approach, which means they're sharing their employees' salaries.

In Novu’s case, it means sharing our handbook. Also, we share all our repositories, our main product, websites, CMS, and many others. We keep most of our team channels and communication public to ensure the community has the full context of what we are working on. Writing this blog post is also a significant part of sharing our process publicly for everyone to know.

Ask a different question

Instead of asking the standard question: should we make this public? We ask, should we make it private?

We need to find a reason to make something private because we are trying to build with the community. It’s a lot harder to work with the community and have them be a part of something if they lack context or information.

One of the contributors we recruited already had a context on what we are doing as he already checked Novu’s code, roadmap, and team conversations. He did the complete engineering onboarding in under four hours and even suggested some new things. This is just one small win.

Here are some tips for becoming transparent

1). Shifting communication from private to public
In Novu we used to have a slack channel for our internal team and a discord channel for our contributors and community, it cause our community to lack context about the decisions we have made. Furthermore, if we decided to share the decisions with the community we had to copy the conversation from slack to discord. As a result, we have decided to move our slack channel and move everything into discord.

2). Expose your internal information
Like almost every company, we have our internal Notion, as part of being open, we have decided to make it public. The team had a lot of concerns, There's so much stuff there, meetings, our advisors, investors, and many more private stuff.

And like I said before, we couldn’t share everything, so we have started Project GlassWing to make our information public and share every possible thing. You can even go to our Notion and see what we offer our employees for their home offices.

We chose the name Project GlassWing because it’s the only butterfly on earth whose wings are actually transparent. You can find our handbook here:
https://handbook.novu.co

3). Stay Humble and expose your vulnerabilities and lack of knowledge
I've been doing the whole entrepreneurship thing for a few years now, and the only thing I can say for sure is that I know nothing about what I'm doing. I'm just putting my emphasis on learning every single day. Don’t try to emphasize how great you are and sweep the bad stuff under the rug. When you expose your vulnerabilities to everybody, you speed up your learning progress and make yourself open to more feedback.

4). Cut the fluff
Engineers can detect fluff from miles away. Founders who “hide” their progress/roadmap or are not really transparent with their community will hit the wall quickly because most engineers will tackle them with many hard questions they tried to avoid. I think that one of the reasons open-source is that big is because when I want to implement something, I want to see the code, know the company’s roadmap and be a part of the company discussion. Our community invests a lot of time writing code, creating discussions, and improving Novu. If they don’t know what will happen next, how can they trust us?

We have talked about it here!

Do you want to learn more about building in public? Join our discord!

https://discord.gg/8zfPkuAdA3

Also check out the first open-source notification infrastructure - Novu
https://github.com/novuhq/novu