Ensuring the Difference in Value between Project and Product is Big Enough with André Eriksson

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with André Eriksson, founder and CEO at Encore. We talked about how open source develops trust, something I also discussed in the episode I recorded with Reshma Khilnani. For Encore, it’s subtly different, though. In the case of Medplum, open source is a differentiator in a market that’s used to black boxes, for Encore, open source is tablestakes in a market that won’t adopt a completely proprietary software.

We talked about:

• Launching with a cloud platform from day one — not the open source project.
• On the other hand, open source is also important because often users and customers have to modify things to get it exactly right; the flexibility is a critical part of the platform’s draw.
• The challenge getting contributions, which André doesn’t find surprising, especially because it’s a project/product that solves problems for companies, not hobby projects.
• Having one brand for the open source project and the product, which can make it hard to communicate the difference between them.
• Ensuring that the open source project and all of the features in it are useable without being dependent on the commercial product — which is not always easy. Finding the right balance between avoiding crippleware and still having enough of a difference in value between the open source and the commercial product to sell it is a core challenge.
• The biggest risks from open source, which André kicked off by talking about the difference between what you perceive as a big risk and what objectively is — this is a distinction that I think is super important to understand in life and business. Ultimately he settled on a big risk just being that you build something that isn’t valuable or differentiated enough for people to pay for.
• Communicating the value proposition clearly is their top challenge at the moment.

Check out the full episode for some serious insights into what’s working and what’s a struggle at Encore.