Hello dev.to, this is Scoutflo 💙

Scoutflo — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 22:25:56 +0000

What better way to introduce ourselves on a new platform than this!

Here's Scoutflo Wrapped: A recap of the 6-month journey of Scoutflo 💙

The 2022 Spotify Wrapped was the initial spark of this idea. In other words, it was the ✨ inspiration ✨

And then, of course, everybody started doing it 🙃

However, like every other important thing — let’s focus on the WHY.

A year recap gives us an opportunity to reflect on the highlights of our journey, and celebrate the small wins.

Scoutflo is an early-stage startup that started its journey about 6 months ago. Especially being out there and creating content.

We’re on a mission to make commercial open source (COSS) mainstream. Some of the steps are:

Creating more awareness about open source software
Guiding newbies to understand open source contribution
Celebrating the work of OSS contributors
Building a platform for discovering high-quality OSS tools
Increasing adoption of OSS tools
Helping COSS companies grow

While our engineering team is hard at work to build the platform (our 1st product), we’ve been focusing on content creation for helping our audience.

Before we begin, here are some small wins we’re low-key proud of ✨

Posted over 650 tweets
Crossed 200 followers on Twitter
Crossed 70 followers on LinkedIn
Crossed 50 followers on Hashnode*

Our blogs got featured not once or twice, but thrice!

This is a recap of not a year, but 6 months of our journey so far.

We posted our first official tweet thread on 23rd June, 2022 and introduced our website.

In July, we talked about the history and origin of Open Source Software.

"Do you know the origin story of Open Source Software?"

In August, we started posting #ScoutfloSummary of Twitter Spaces about OSS.

Big ups to Eddie Jaoude and CHAOSS Africa for hosting some brilliant Spaces worth documenting!

Blog posts

Published our 1st blog — ‘What’s the Open Source hype all about?’ in September.

It covers the origin and evolution of open source, addresses some common myths, and explains why open source software is already the next big thing.

Read: What’s the Open Source hype all about? | Scoutflo

Our 2nd blog — A Beginner’s Guide to Open Source Contribution covered the basics of OSS, types of open source contributions (Code and No-code) and some project recommendations.

Read: A starter guide to types of open source contribution.

The Hashnode edition of this blog outperformed our expectations and how. It got featured on the platform and trended! 🎉

The feedback

It also received some amazing feedback from the community! ✨

The blog’s Medium version also got featured on paper.li!

In the meantime, we also started posting much more actively on Twitter.

Scoutflo’s Open Source Product of the week

We started this series as a way to promote good quality OSS products, and share their origin stories with some lesser-known facts.

Our first official Product of the week post: Typesense

Some other Open Source Product of the week features:

Medusa
The leading open-source Shopify alternative.

Fonoster
An open-source alternative to Twilio.

Strapi
The leading open-source headless CMS that’s developer-first.

Penpot
An open-source alternative to Figma.

Cal.com
An alternative to Calendly — schedule meetings without the email tennis.

Appwrite
An open-source backend-as-a-service platform, an alternative to Firebase.

Plausible Analytics
An open-source alternative to Google Analytics.

Erxes
An open-source experience operating system aka HubSpot alternative.

Given the tremendous response, we decided to take Scoutflo’s Open Source Product of the week to the next level, and started creating long-form content as well.

Open Source Product-specific Blog Posts

More depth, greater shelf-life, and ease of access + distribution. A clear win-win for the OSS companies, and the audiences. The 2 published so far:

Read: The Google Analytics alternative you need | Scoutflo

Read: The Story of Strapi: A Stellar Open Source Headless CMS | Scoutflo

More Feedback

The blog for Strapi also got featured on paper.li! (Our 3rd feature so far)

Our last OSS Product post for 2022 for OpenBB saw incredible engagement! 🎉

What else?

Scoutflo Summary of Twitter Spaces

Twitter Spaces Summary — Eddie’s, CHAOSS Africa’s and more. Here’s the most popular one!

The Open Source India Conference

In October, we attended and covered Asia’s largest Open Source Conference held in Bangalore, India. It was a 2-day event with some amazing speakers, panelists, and guests from various backgrounds.

The 2022 conference had leading sponsors like GitHub, Shell, SODA Foundation, Azure, Google Cloud, AWS Cloud, YML, Harness and more.

Forem: Scoutflo