Notes
Most OSS projects receive no money, we do it in our free time because we love it. But @liyasthomas is building a company out of his opensource side-project and he shared his insights with us on how he did just that.
Liyas is building @hoppscotch_io, an open-source API development ecosystem. He started almost 2 years back because Postman was too heavy and broke his system! He needed something more lightweight. He build a crude MVP quickly to solve his problem and for the past 2 years, he has been adding features and fixing issues with the help of an amazing and vibrant community!
The community is at the core and is the strength of this project. They have made almost 1k+ PRs with 150+ contributors and he has a few tips on how this came about.
-
Provide value to the user. If they genuinely get value from the project they will love to contribute time and code to the project to see it grow.
-
made hoppscotch a super friendly project. People are welcome to make even the smallest 1 line changes.
-
they have an awesome practice where they pair up people with complementary skills to work on a PR. This is a very cool practice IMO. This means a designer from US can collaborate with backend dev in India or China on a single PR. Contributors can focus on areas they r good.
-
Actively write about and share what’s going on within the project. This helps people follow your project and basically document your progress for others or your future self.
As Liyas wisely says: “The value of an OSS product is the Community. You can always copy the code but you can’t copy the community.”
What is the future of hoppscotch?
After raising a seed round they are now focusing on getting an enterprise version ready. hoppscotch from the start has been an indie project for individuals and small teams but there is a lot of value it can provide large teams with 50+ engs.
Checkout https://github.com/hoppscotch/hoppscotch if you want to be a part of this community or want to get updated on what the future plans are. All the best to @liyasthomas and the entire team at @hoppscotch_io