Open Source Wasn’t Marketing
We made our AI email assistant open source. This was 3 years ago. When you still had to convince people open source was a good idea and could make money.
At first, people thought the benefit was distribution.
More GitHub stars. More technical users. More people discovering the product.
That happened to some extent, but it wasn’t the main benefit.
The real benefit was trust.
When you’re asking for inbox access, people have reasonable questions:
What are you doing with my emails?
Can I inspect the code?
Can I self-host?
Is this just another black box connected to my Gmail?
What happens if the company disappears?
Open source gave us a better answer than another polished security page.
It didn’t remove every concern, but it changed the conversation.
Instead of “trust us,” it became “you can look.”
That matters a lot in categories where the data is sensitive.
The downside is that open source also forces discipline. You can’t hide messy assumptions forever. People see the product, the code, the issues, the tradeoffs.
But for this kind of product, I think that’s a feature.
My lesson: open source is not automatically a growth strategy. But for a product that touches private workflows, it can be a trust strategy.
And sometimes trust is the actual distribution problem.