GitHub GitHub Universe 2022 - Community, 21 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: How to open source as a startup - Universe 2022

Description

Anand Chowdhary reflects on his journey building an accessibility technology company that started as an open source browser extension, and building and launching an open source project with 10k+ stars as a side project at his new startup. In this session, open source maintainers will learn about open source monetization options like dual licensing and how to fundraise and build a business around open source projects, and founders will learn about the benefits of investing in open source as a startup.

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A

Good morning, thank you so much for being here. My name is Anand Chaudhary and I am going to talk about how to open source as a startup. So I am a maintainer and a Founder I'm, a GitHub star for the second year in a row and I've also built a few technology focused companies. So what I try to do is combine open source with entrepreneurship.

A

All right today, I'm going to talk about three things: my open source project that became a software for service company, what I'm up to right now and you won't believe it completely unrelated attack and encouraging maintainers to become Founders. So, let's get started with my open source project to staff Journey, so my open source Journey starts in 2016.

A

eight years after I published my first website, so I published my first site on the internet when I was 10 years old and I was on GitHub. Next week it's going to be 10 years that I've been on GitHub. So it's like mind-blowing um for me personally, that I've been the thing is while I was growing up all of the code, I was writing. I would put on GitHub, just as you know, a public repository, but in 2016 I actually built my first.

A

What you would call an open source project right with contributors and a healthy community and how it got started was that I was working as a consultant for a bunch of e-commerce companies and while I was working with them, I noticed that a lot of their websites were not very accessible for people with disabilities. This means that people with disabilities would have trouble using their site and I would make the case that this is not just for it's the right thing to do. This is a business decision.

A

You want to make your sites really accessible, and it just happened to be that I was participating in the angel hack, hackathon right that weekend and I thought. Okay, so I can work with all of my clients to make their fights more accessible, but what, if I, could build something that would add? Accessibility features to any website that you're on, so that we can hackathon I ended up building authority for Chrome, which is a browser extension that helps you read more easily on the web.

A

So in 24 hours we built a quick project and we won the code for impact challenge a ranger hack and how it works is really simple. So this is Wikipedia right and you can see that you can read an article here and on the top right, you can click on the plugin and it would say also if disabled and you have the option to enable it really simply as soon as you press this button Wikipedia would be redefined in a way that is more easily readable for you.

A

So for me personally, it could be that I find white and black high contrast too much so I change it to Yellow on black. It could be that I want the font much bigger to make it more easily readable. So you can see that the fonts are much bigger. You would also notice that that, if more space between each letter each word and each line, so you can press on preferences and you can customize your reading experience so with Ausable for Chrome.

A

You can say you know: I have a learning disability like dyslexia or I, wear specs, so I want a bigger font size and you can see a live preview on the right and you can select everything from the colors to the font, to space between everything and you can really personalize your reading experience and it would be applied across the web.

A

So that's the whole story right go to a weekend, hackathon build the cool project, uh put it up on GitHub, MIT licensed and people use it a bit, uh and then that was it. I went to design school and because I always kind of fan, feed myself as a designer and engineer so I thought: hey, I'm, going to enjoy design school and in my second week in design school I got an email from a therapist who works with children with disabilities in New York, and she sent me this email.

A

She said: I love, it I work with children with disabilities and I also use visual modifications. Myself and your extension is the best out there um and I was like mind. Blown I was like okay, wait, so I made something in like a weekend. Hackathon and a real therapist is using this with real kids and she's, telling me that it's the best product she's used in this space. That means someone has to work harder in this space and I thought.

A

Okay, um I have the opportunity, so let me see what I can do and when I was looking through, the deck I found a review that really summarizes how I was thinking. So this is a launch review on the Chrome web store and he said that he has photophobia, which is a condition where your eye doesn't like very high contrast.

A

uh It's because your cornea lets in some light, and then you get a bunch of irritation and he says that the default, which is you know, black text on a white background which is just how the web is designed, is too high contrast and he is not able to use the web easily and he says that the plugin literally changed his life and I was like okay. Now it's too much for me to handle so so I was like.

A

I was, of course, very grateful that he said you know thank you for keeping it free, um but I thought um I should be doing more, because if it's genuinely true that real people have problems that can be solved in something that you build in a couple of hours as a hackathon.

A

It's almost your moral responsibility to do more um so I called my mom and I said: I want to drop out of design school and I want to come back home and I want to work on this full time, and so I did that so from this review, I thought okay.

A

So what people are telling me is that they want a personal life experience when they're reading on the web and in general, and it would be really nice if we can keep it free so that kind of I came up with this idea that okay, what if we could make accessibility available as a feature everywhere, and we could make it free for consumers, but we can build a business around it by charging companies who can afford to pay. So the idea was okay.

A

So if we have a brother extension, the idea was then each website doesn't have to work super hard to add customization, because you have a browser extension, but then you have to install it.

A

So I thought: okay, let's go one level down what if we could add this as a feature on all website, so it came up with the idea that okay, we can build an online platform for accessibility, and then we can go one step down what if we could Implement all of this technology on the device itself, then everything that you read on your entire computer would be accessible for you, based on your personal reading preferences, so we started with the device and we started with the smartphone and we built a smartphone.

A

um So how it worked was that you would um buy a smartphone and it would have a really simple user interface, just six buttons and how we defined it was that imagine you are a farmer in rural India and you cannot read what you can do if know that, if I prefer on the thing that looks like a newspaper, my phone is going to read out the news to me in my native language and how it worked for people with disabilities is, for example, I invented a technology with which people who are partially or completely visually impaired can actually feel vibrations in their hand and get audio feedback to use a smartphone really easily.

A

So we built a smartphone under the hood how it worked if it was an Android phone and we built a custom ROM on top on top of Android uh back then with Android 5, and we added a bunch of stuff like our speech and vibration, technology and accessible user interface, and all of these customization features that everything was built on top of the problem was when I and I did this.

A

Actually, when I would go to a blind relief organization or a non-profit or a blind school I would say you can use a smartphone for the first time really easily. All you need to do is buy an Android smartphone, get root access to it, install fire engine mode, learn how to break the kernel and then install a custom ROM, and that was not a very good pitch. So we thought okay, what if you could install all of our Tech in any smartphone, so we ended up building apps, for example, augmentedly.

A

If an AR reading app that helps kid with dyslexia read more easily, so how it works. Is you have a textbook? You take a photo of the book and you can see the text in real time in AR, but in a dyslexia, friendly reading format, we worked with some students and we published a research paper in the IEEE that shows that kids with dyslexia could actually read 20 faster with our app. We also build live subtitles, which is, as it sounds, subtitled for real life.

A

So imagine if you're hearing impaired you're watching a movie, you can read the subtitles. What, if you were having a conversation- and you can point to a smartphone and you can get the subtitles really simple and we also built visibly, which is an app that helps people who are blind, just walk around with live audio feedback, so it would say you know, there's a tree in five meters, or this is the currency node that you're looking at right now and so on.

A

So the last two are progressive web apps and the first one is available on iPhone and Android, um and this is how we started building the company. On the other side, we thought okay. Now, if we want to build a business around it, we would Target institutions like Enterprises and governments, and we built our web accessibility platform. So this is not an accessibility overlay. You know any product that tells you that add our product and you will become accessible, is lying to you. What it is is a customization platform.

A

It helps you add, a set of features with which people can customize your website to their reading preferences and it also integrates with your help desk or your live chat and all the tools. But it's almost like one platform to help. People use your fight more easily, so we work with, for example, the government of India's program, startup India. If you go to their site, startup india.gov dot in you can use our plugin.

A

So you work now with Enterprise events to add all of this technology built in and we built on top of it with the product called daily, which is basically a robot. That would go to your website every day and it would check for accessibility issues, and it would tell you when there's an accessibility issue really simple. So that's my story from a weekend: hackathon project to a software as a service company which does a bunch of different stuff in the accessibility technology space.

A

What am I up to these days is I in 2020 started a new company called Fabio, which is a completely different thing. So pabio offers Rent to Own Furniture with personalized interior design in Europe. So how it works is you know, imagine you rent an apartment.

A

You can take some photos of your Empty Apartment and you can upload them on our website and you will receive a personalized interior design concept of what your fully furnished apartment can look like based on your own taste, and how do you want it to be and when you're happy you find a contract and we deliver install assemble, set up the whole place.

A

You just have to move in there and just like you pay the rent, you pay a monthly subscription fee for audio furniture and at the end of your subscription you can either pay the difference and actually own the furniture. If you want to keep it or we can take it back refurbish it and put it in a new apartment at a discount. So it's a circular economy with accessible interior design company we went through icon, Dominator laughter and it's been fun.

A

You know we're available in Switzerland we just launched in Berlin and Munich earlier this year for planets to grow in Europe. um So you know my friends told me this is the least technical thing you're doing as a engineer designer, but there's a lot of really fun. Tech, you know we have our own rendering technology with the all of the school 3D renders. We also do a lot of fun warehouse, Logistics stuff.

A

You know we can predict what kind of furniture we need to order when based on what people are looking at, but when we built the site, you know we have a really nice site and we have uh onboarding and customers are coming. I thought I need to know. If it ever goes down. You know, I thought, I need an uptime. Monitor and I need a ferris page, and there are a bunch of these options right.

A

There are Enterprise view options and there's also free options like uptime robot is the most famous One um the problem with uptime robot is, you know not very customizable, it's very opinionated and I thought: hey GitHub actions. Has this new thing called scheduled workflows. So what? If I could tell GitHub actions to run a workflow every five minutes? And it's going to be really simple? You just do curl my site and if it's down it should tell me it's down. Otherwise nothing right, really simple and we ended up building uptime.

A

So how uptime works if we have a template repository with all the GitHub action set up, you just have to click the use, this template button and you add all of your URLs. What are the sites you want to monitor? You add all the notifications, like you, know, inform me on Flac or send me an email when something goes down and uptime will set up your repository. So on your readme, you can see your Live status of your website.

A

You can see, you know, response time graph and historical uptime and we use git as a way to track historical uptime. So each commit means every time your site was up or down, and then we integrate with GitHub issues. So if anything ever goes wrong, uptime automatically opens a GitHub issue and you can then use that issue as incident reporting. So you know if you're investigating what happened.

A

You can write a little comment when you build a fix, you can write another comment and as soon as your site comes back up, uptime will close the issue and mark the incident as resolved, and then, lastly, you get a really beautiful status. Page, so you can publish this on your own domain. You can customize the site, you can share it with your customers and they can say all of the past incidents they can see if the site is currently up or not, they can see all the history and so on.

A

So again this was really a quick idea for Raphael and we ended up building a really fun open source project. uh Today, uptime is my most popular project with 12K stars and some of my favorite companies use uptime in production um like authentication, open source, startup, Ori or Waka time that I use for tracking coding, time or chatwood, which is an open source, live chat, company or canonical. The people who make Ubuntu and what's really interesting, is I.

A

Did this quick back of the envelope calculation that every month, almost 7 500 hours of free Fiat time if you've just buy uptime alone? And it's really interesting like so for every hour, that passive in human time 10 hours pass in uptime time and it's all free CI minutes, because on GitHub actions you don't have to pay if it's a public Repository?

A

uh So that's really cool that a lot of people are using up time, so you can ask: um how does uptime generate value for Fabio? Why would uh Furniture startup build an open source project that have nothing to do with it? For roughly with a few things uh and I and I learned that from all the inbound we got, for example, people want to work at Fabio we get. We get basically a really great free, high quality hiring pipeline, because um people like uptime, they use it for their personal projects and then they say hey.

A

Who are the people who are building this project? Who are the maintainers of this project and then they see? Okay, this is a company YC funded. This is what they're up to and then they say, yeah I want to work here, it's really great, so that makes it that gives us a really nice unfair advantage to be able to hire better it. Also. This is a bit personal for me, which is that it also adds authenticity as a technology company because we do sell Furniture.

A

So um you know all companies say that they're a tech company, but we can prove it right. We can say this is, for example, some of the open source stuff that we're up to uh we've been up to these days um and, most importantly, I think it builds company culture uh it.

A

We can ingrain with in our values that um just like any other company, we are also built on top of Open Source and it's our responsibility to give back to the ecosystem and then finally, I think it also adds developer education as a free perk, because the employers who work into a company now learn how to triage issues and how to do the stuff that maintainers usually do, and it's like a brand new skill set that they can learn and apply in other parts of the business.

A

I was reading the 2024th contribution survey by the Linux foundation and the lab for Innovation science at Harvard and the top three reasons that people responded as motivations for open source contribution were one adding a needed feature of fix, which makes sense right, as developers would like to scratch our own Edge. And if you know, there's a bug in a project or we want a new feature a lot of times.

A

We just make a pull request, make sense um you enjoy learning new stuff, uh which also makes a lot of sense because I've contribution, that's how I got started right, um but before I actually had a proper project which had a community I was building in the open.

A

You know my personal website, other stuff I would just put it up on GitHub uh and, and sometimes people would start it and I would learn a lot through other projects and, lastly, which is most interesting uh for pabio- is that people said that it fulfills a creative desire. People enjoy their work more when they get to do open source. So how do you get started with open source at your own company?

A

I? Think the easiest is to Fed Up an open source strategy. You can encourage contributions internally, like we do, um and how do you do that I think you can really start with the absolute minimum right. You can take baby steps like a hackathon.

A

You could, for example, say: if your employees want to go for a weekend hackathon, we will cover the cost or we can do a weekly print every quarter, where we do a print week of maintaining open source projects or doing a new open source project, and what we started doing at Fabio is the third one which is open sourcing.

A

Your internal tools, so uptime for us was a quick solution uh that I came up with it's almost like a hack to use GitHub actions like this, um but it's now a really popular open source project and we built it for ourselves and ended up giving it to the world and so I think a lot of people. You know think about IP or you know defensibility, and they don't want to build their own companies stack open source which I understand um it's a school of thought.

A

I can respect it, but what you can do is start with non-critical components. You know think side projects, but also, for example, Your Divine system. If you make these open source, you encourage more Community, you encourage a great hiring Pipeline and- and you don't feel like your core IP- is available in an MIT license. If you have problems with that which is fine and then lastly, for example, you can sponsor your Upstream dependencies.

A

Github makes it really easy for you to see what are the projects that your code base relies upon, and you can, for example, use commands like npm fund to find out what are the most popular maintainers, who accept GitHub, sponsorships or patreon sponsorships, and it's almost in your vested interest to make sure that your Upstream dependencies are maintained, and so another really easy way to get started with open source contribution is tools sponsor your dependencies.

A

I have another really fun example: um I used to work with El Nino, which is a consulting company in ensure day, that's a city in the eastern part of the Netherlands near the Dutch near the German border, and so I was Consulting for the consulting company. I was like a consultant consultant and um what I noticed was that for each of their clients, uh apparently and I was really surprised. File uploading was an unsolved problem.

A

You know you want to let people drag and drop or like upload files and then make sure the it's compressed or whatever, and they were writing all of this code. Again and again so internally we built a product called upload. It's a fully front-end, no back-end required file. Uploading widget. How it works is that you press a button upload a file and this widget opens up and then you can drag and drop files. You can use the camera of your device to take a photo.

A

You can import it from a URL or you can search on unsplash to find photos. You can just find the photos you can edit them within upload, so you can, you know, crop them add, filter whatever and then, when you're happy, we upload it to the server really simple. We built it again as an internal tool so that we don't have to do file uploads again and again, and this was my first project that got 1K start from GitHub.

A

So it's very important to me and we also launched it on product Hunter with the number one product so again, digital agency, nothing to do with open source built a project to scratch their own Edge, but ended up doing something better for the whole ecosystem by making an open source project.

A

So when you're getting started with open source at your company, whenever I, for example, talk to my friends who are maintainers who work at regular companies, they say I say how do you find the time to do all of this great open source work? And you know it's like I I. Do it on the weekend, you know or I. Do it at night when I go home or whatever so I think there are these anti-patterns that may already exist in your company I.

A

Don't think you should have to take lunch or night for weekends to do open source. You should be able to contribute on company time. So what you can do as a startup, founder or employee, you can instead of your employee feeling guilty about spending company time on Open Force. You should in fact encourage it by having systems of accountability and time management.

A

You can say you get to do these many hours every week on open source, really simple and then one pet peeve of mine, not a big problem is a lot of companies make you have a separate open source, get GitHub account and a word GitHub account I find that really annoying. We use GitHub Enterprise as well. You don't actually have to do that, no matter what they say and I think having the same account is almost like: a change in mindset that you Embrace and recognize contributions.

A

People who contribute to open source projects can Champion open source at your organization because you would see all of their contributions on their profile and, on the other hand, all the people who look at their public GitHub profile will also see all the the work they've been doing in their private repository if they want. So what would be an MVP right in startup, lingo MVP is a minimum viable product where you don't have to do a lot of work, but you can quickly validate an idea, so I think in MVP is an internal sponsor fund.

A

It's really simple: to set up, we do it at Fabio. It can be released more. You can say you know a hundred dollars for each employee in your company and they get to spend it. However, they want on GitHub sponsors.

A

um I. Think this solves a really interesting problem, because usually the top management does not understand the importance of Open Source, on top of which their business is built, but the developers who are writing the code know it much better. So what if we couldn't encourage developers to fund open source projects directly, but using company money, so at Fabio? We do it like this.

A

We just give a budget with a company card to everyone, and we ask our employees to vote on what are the projects that we as a company should sponsor, and we also give them a budget on sponsoring stuff from their personal account. That's really fun because then they also get the little oh yeah I'm sponsoring all of these projects, myself right and they don't have to you know.

A

If you do 20 projects ten dollars a month, they don't have to find 200 from their own paycheck to pay for it, I think also, as in a company, you have a vested interest that you can have no single point of failure in your Upstream dependencies. So you know, for example, we remember what happened to like UA, parser or all the all the stuff that happened related to that um you can align your incentives with maintainers by sponsoring them right. It makes a lot of sense.

A

um Maintainers would be incentivized to fix security bugs or report vulnerabilities faster if they get paid to work on it and you, um as a company, realize that this is better for you, you're, actually investing that money for that. Your code base is better and then, lastly, for Fabio, I found this in the wild and I find it really cool. It's a really nice hiring perk right on our hiring notion. We say you know you get a new laptop and you get whatever developer education courses, but also we have GitHub sponsor fund.

A

So people bring this up constantly in interviews that I love the fact that I can sponsor people on GitHub um I have an employee at this company, um so I think it's really easy to set up an open field strategy at your company, and you would realize that it has a lot of impact not just on the open for fecal system, but also on your core business.

A

Lastly, um I love championing the idea of maintainer to founder, so I think um if you're maintainers I encourage you to take the plunge starting, an open source company is really cool. These days, um you know open source. I think is swinging back around right, like if you think about it.

A

We had the days of like the free software foundation, and then we had uh almost the value of not great stuff happening, but then, today we have large, publicly traded institutions that are built on open source, not just red hat, but also like and elastic right, like modern companies, um and some of my favorite ones are here.

A

Like um like swix, which does open for web hooks or growth book, which does open source a b testing, um people are building on top of this and I think a really cool example is Microsoft right um in the 90s Microsoft, like imagine, is the evil company right this anti-struct lawsuits and um nobody likes open source and everything is proprietary and then fast forward to today, Microsoft is the most important company on Earth in the open source ecosystem right like for me personally, um everything that I do all day is npm and GitHub, and I write typescript in vs code and it's all Microsoft and then now it's also actions and co-pilot, and all of this great stuff happening uh that we've heard about this morning.

A

So I think this is a strong validation that open source is swinging back around, and this is the exact right time to get started. I think personally, open source companies are really the best of both worlds uh and there's a lot of ways to do this now, for example, um fourth graph, which is an open source code. First company they do licensing. So it's an MIT license repository, meaning it's really open source.

A

Like free apps and freedom- and you can do whatever you want with it, but they have a little folder in the GitHub repository called Enterprise, and if any code, that's in this folder, if in our Enterprise license so companies that need all of those extra features can pay for it. This is called dual licensing. There's also delayed licensing where you can, for example, put stuff in a proprietary license now, but then make it open source later.

A

So there's a lot of cool ways to get started: I also like nest.js, which is a type back-end framework that does sponsor wear and a lot of Consulting and support So as a maintainer. You can sell your time and you can say: I will find an FLA and I will give you guaranteed. You know one hour of support every month, so that I can help you fix problems with using my tools and get paid for it and and lastly, I think fundraising has become accessible than ever. Right like there are VC funds.

A

Now that fund exclusively in open source and also traditional venture capital, is now investing in open source as well, um and you know like before remakes acquired by Shopify last week, uh but also like all of the great stuff. That's happening in the JavaScript ecosystem like bun and Dino are all venture funded, um and some of my and one of my favorite companies is forcecraft, uh which was started by people from my University as an open source project and then raise millions of dollars.

A

uh If I think, if you're, looking at the Venture side and fast accelerated growth now evolved for the exact right time to take your open source project and then build a business on top of it. If you're kind of more interested in this topic, especially around licensing, because that could be a bit intimidating when you're getting started with how do I build a business but also have a strong open source license. I recommend this book written by my friend Heather.

A

It's called open source for business and um and I and I wish you the best of luck with setting up open source at your organization, so just to quickly summarize right. So I have these two stories from making an open source project to a company and then starting a company and then realizing that I can build open source in there and I think the Best of Both Worlds these days is to build an open source company, so keep building, keep shipping and I'm. Always here, if you have questions, thank you so much enjoy the universe.