This January, we recorded our first Community Question Time with our co-founders Ben and Rijk to ask them whatās on your mind as we move from just a well-loved open source project to a sustainable business that can fund its development. We aim to be as open and transparent as possible, so keep the questions coming as weāll be doing this every few months. You can submit questions on GitHub or anonymously using this form. .
One of the common themes in the questions you posed was around how we balance continued care and growth for our community with the realities of a business. āThe community is the foundation that everything else is built on. It started as an open source project, still is, and will remain to be.ā says Rijk. āThe community input and the tight feedback loop makes the project what it is. The goal is to help as many people as we can.ā
Iāve been at Directus for a couple of months now, and itās really true. Many of our engineers started as community contributors, and that instinct to think deeply about how decisions impact the wider usage is really apparent.
But there are some challenges in the balancing act we have. Having a happy and engaged community grows our project and our user base, but we need to make that sustainable through revenue. We want people to be able to rely on Directus for not just a year or two, but 5-10 or more years in the future. There are loads of costs involved in building software at this scale.
Business Feature Requests Ride the Same Wave
How we decided what to work on was historically based on intuition, but inevitably thereās more of a process now, especially with a lot of feature requests coming in.
Our decisions on what to spend time on are largely based on community interest through GitHub Discussions and upvoted ideas. Weāre lucky that most of the sponsored features weāve had to-date are what the wider community are already asking for, so we can prioritize, build, and make features available to everyone while generating revenue. It goes to show that the needs of the community are inherently the needs of everyone else.
Because Directus is so extensible, we can also build custom extensions for business when the ask is hyper-specific, to make sure weāre not pushing bloat into the core open source project.
Whatās Going on with Discord?
As some members of our Discord server have noticed, many of our community discussion channels went away for a while and were replaced with a single help forum channel. While we try our best, we sometimes donāt get around to questions very quickly, or sometimes at all.
In the early days, we had a smaller open source community. There were fewer questions and it was easy to answer them all before starting a day of work. Now, it would be several peopleās full-time jobs to do this, and the exponential community growth isnāt matched by a growth in the hours our team can spend helping folks 1:1.
We did notice, however, that we were getting lots of questions that are similar and that shows us the gap in our educational materials. Our focus has had to shift from helping 1:1 to trying to help out the community as a whole, prioritizing, and then tackling at the source. Ideally, we can help people without them needing to come to us.
We also have a paid support offering, and as demand increases, so does the revenue, which can be spent on more people to do support, but even then they have a job to support users with agreements in place first, and the demand from inbound questions outweighs the overall time they have.
Iām sure this isnāt what everyone wants to hear, but itās one worth being transparent about as we have millions of downloads and a need to be sustainable (both financially and in our work:life balance). Weāre 30 people who try our best and deeply care about people who support and celebrate the project we work on.
In positive news, thereās some changes coming to the Discord server in the coming weeks to kickstart some of the community discussions and help people know what to expect from us.
The Vision for VCs
Last year, we announced our Series A funding, and with funding comes new stakeholders who need to make a return on their investment.
This is exciting for us, but Iāll be the first to admit that I start to worry when seeing this news around a project I like and rely on. I asked Ben, our CEO, how we make money and what vision he sold to VCs when fundraising.
We plan to make money in three ways.
Firstly, and what youāre likely most familiar with, the hosted cloud platform - we have an open source ācakeā with some āicingā only available when hosting on Directus Cloud. On top of taking away the headache of hosting, scaling infrastructure, and keeping software updated, we will have some special extensions only available in Cloud.
Extending the cake analogy, itās important to keep an eye on the ratio of forever free and open source features and features only available in Cloud. Ben describes this as āwhat makes a tasty cakeā. A nice sponge is the core and it is a perfectly tasty and functional cake in its own right. Itās important to get the ratio of icing correct for a cake to work. A large sponge with an icing layer is great. A tiny cupcake with so much icing itās unrecognizable is not.
The second way we make money is through professional services - support, consultation, and sponsored development. All things that our bigger customers and more complex use cases need to be successful.
Finally, coming up soon, is an extensions marketplace. Think of it like an app store with easy-to-install extensions in your Directus instance. Some free, some paid, and with the ability for community members to also generate revenue from.
So what is the vision sold to VCs? Not much more than that. We have over 20 million Docker downloads and a ārising tide lifts all shipsā as Ben says. If youāre a self-hosted user today and youāre happy - rock on. We remain commited to our open source project because it needs only a small percentage to trust us with their hosting, professional services, or want our cloud-only icing to make this all work.
Watch the Video
This is just a quick summary of what I thought would be most interesting for you to read. But in the video we cover even more, like:
- What have been some of our mistakes to date?
- What does 2023 have in store?
- What is our CEO worried about?
Weāll run Community Question Time every few months, so please submit questions on GitHub or anonymously using this form.
Weāre also going to be releasing a monthly video starting next month with Rijk to give you an update on what weāre cooking up, talk about software development practices at Directus, and go through your more technical questions.