Market Mix - Open source link management 🔗

Welcome to a new edition of Open Pioneers - your weekly update from the forefront of open source. Today, we talk about:

If you enjoy this week's post, it would make my day if you shared it with a friend or colleague.

🔍 Spotlight: Dub

Dub is an open source link management infrastructure and a modern alternative to Bitly, Linktree, and others. After the project was started at Vercel in October 2022, it quickly gained traction and collected over 14k stars on GitHub. The founder, Steven Tey, recently turned this side project into a startup and now focuses full-time on building Dub. The repository is available under the AGPL v3 license, but there is also a hosted version that you can sign up for.

Learn more about Dub: Website | GitHub | Twitter

🎙️ Interview with Steven (Founder of Dub)

Hi Steven! What is Dub, and which problem is it solving?

Dub.co is the link management infrastructure for companies to create marketing campaigns, link-sharing features, and referral programs. 

How did you come to start Dub?

Back in 2022, I built Dub.co as a side project to solve an internal need we had at Vercel – sharing links on social platforms (X, LinkedIn, and iMessage) with beautiful Open Graph images to improve click-through rates.

The product was fully open-source and quickly gained a lot of traction – it reached #1 on Hacker News and was even trending on GitHub for a little while.

Over the next 12 months, Dub.co continued to grow – mostly through word of mouth, without spending a cent on paid marketing.

You went from 0 to 10k+ GitHub stars in one year - without any team, funding, etc. What were the main drivers of growth?

It was a combination of the initial launch traction + word of mouth. We had a beautifully designed open-source product, and people would share it with their friends & colleagues.

What are 3 open source projects you look up to?

🔥 10 reasons why you should open source your company - by Supabase CTO

I recently stumbled across this excellent post by Supabase CTO & Co-Founder Ant Wilson from 2022. It discusses a question I frequently get: “Should I open source my company?”

Ant, as an open source founder obviously biased towards open source, highlights the following benefits of doing open sourcing a company:

This list is not exhaustive, and I think there are a few areas that Ant didn’t touch - for example - the go-to-market advantages or the improved capital efficiency that goes with it.

Nevertheless, I think it’s a pretty good list of reasons. Perhaps I'll write a list of reasons NOT to use open source your company another time.

🦄 Open source startup radar

💼 Work in open source

Not a fit for you? Check out more opportunities at ossjobs.dev.

Until next week,

Jonathan (@jonathimer)