At the end of last year, I wrote about my experience co-founding Bridgecrew* and how finding and activating our community heroes—the builders using our product—was critically important to our growth as an open-core software company. Open-core software is a model in which the core version is available as open-source software (OSS), while additional features or functionalities are offered as commercial extensions.

I started my career as an OSS developer, and I feel passionately about the role of open source in the technology ecosystem. OSS is about more than free software: It fosters collaboration, transparency and innovation, enabling developers worldwide to create something greater than one person or organization could accomplish alone.

But, as we realized at Bridgecrew*, and as I counsel companies today, simply creating a great open-core product isn’t enough to grow and scale a business. To succeed, companies must increase user signups, boost use of the software and, most critically, secure paying customers.

There is, of course, a natural tension between open-source and enterprise software, felt acutely by companies and leaders that have invested heavily in developing an open-source community. As more and more businesses turn to open-core SaaS solutions, it’s critically important that founders get the attention, usage and compensation for their products that they deserve.

So, if you’ve already invested in building community for your OSS product and are now looking to increase signup and activation, here’s what to focus on:

1. Start with developing premium features.

As a first step, you should work to understand your users’ needs and pain points by connecting with your developer community heroes and/or by analyzing usage patterns. This will help you to identify which commercial resources would most interest your users. Then, you can create them!

GitLab navigated the premium feature-development process particularly effectively. The company expanded the free, open-source version of its platform into a premium version with additional features and support, including performance testing, advanced security controls and compliance management, all of which can appeal to enterprise customers.

Some of these premium features are “locked” for free users and can only be accessed through an upgrade, in a ‘self-serving’ onboarding process implemented by companies like GoLinks.

GoLinks has implemented this kind of ‘self-serving onboarding’ process to guide users to upgrade from the free to paid tier to access enterprise features. Below is an example of how the GoLinks application prompts users to upgrade to a paid tier.

2. Once you have the premium features, you can create a user journey.

You have the users, you have the premium features — but you still need to convince the users to sign up for the commercial tool. This may seem simple, but so many businesses overlook the need to show people where to go. This can be as easy as adding a sign-up button or an option via the command-line interface (CLI) for users to level up.

Creating a straightforward journey in the user interface will help to convert a website visitor to a registered user. Postman* is a great example of how to do this right. As you can see in the below screengrab, Postman* visitors are greeted by a signup page that extolls the platform’s promised features — organization, collaboration, backup and development experience — right beside the option to create a free account.

To ease deployment, make use of social logins by enabling users to sign up with Google, GitHub, Apple and other platforms that are likely to be used by your audience. As an added benefit, some of the oAuth logins will give you data on which organization a user belongs to and where they are based, through geo-ip location.

Some visitors will prefer to begin working in the application before registering, a preference Postman cleverly anticipates in its user interface, enabling users to create an account in the top-right corner of the application whenever they are using it.

Now, creating a user journey in a graphical user interface (GUI) is relatively common, particularly for more-established software companies. But for many OSS tool providers, it can be a more daunting task since many developer tools start at the terminal or command-line interface.

Luckily, you can indeed create a user journey that begins at the terminal and ends in a commercial SaaS application. The Serverless Framework command-line interface (SLS CLI) does this particularly effectively.

SLS CLI assists developers in creating a new project from various templates — like Python or Node web servers — and in setting up a pre-configured working environment of lambda functions. After a user creates a templated project, SLS CLI will suggest that the user register into the Serverless Dashboard — a natural progression from using only the free, open-source CLI to a taste of what the enterprise web application has to offer.

We implemented a similar system at Bridgecrew* with Checkov, our open-source coding tool. As shown in the screenshot below, Checkov users are prompted with a simple yes or no question to level up for additional features.

Both Checkov and SLS created a simple, effective user journey that guides users from their first visit to registration up to activation, by describing the benefits of the premium features and adding simple prompts to level up throughout. Both user journeys take place in the CLI, which requires fewer steps than involving a GUI and produces a higher activation rate.

3. Find the viral integration point

The transition from OSS to enterprise software is often attributed to the increasing needs that come with a scaling organization: Essentially, that the need for the software grows from one user or a handful of users to a bigger team. To help this process along, you can hook the application to common architectures that are viral — visited and viewed frequently — in nature.

Here are a few examples of potential viral integration points:

• CI/CD and version control systems: These are hubs where distributed development teams collaborate on code review. These teams are notified of every success or failure in an application’s build/test/deploy process and multiple teams are notified of every new step. When this happens, they will begin to collaborate on top of a new developer experience.
  • In the example below, a GitHub user opens a pull request with code changes. Humans and Apps (bots) can comment and chat as if they were in a viral town hall, and they can get feedback on the code changes. Hooking your application as a bot into the town hall has a viral effect: The bot might start or contribute to the discussion about the code changes that are about to apply. Blocking or approving a code change by an application (for example, if it does not pass a security or quality test) is also a conversation starter or a change agent to the current status. Being part of the day-to-day work in a popular landing page, such as a pull request, increases adoption and stickiness.

• Incident management and chat: Tools like PagerDuty and OpsGenie*, or custom apps on top of chat platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, help to auto-assign owners for operational incidents. If a champion configures a new reporting application in an incident-management system, ownership of incidents will be automatically distributed within an organization, increasing the number of seats used. As an organization’s number of users of any given software grows, the stickiness of that software increases as it becomes more embedded in internal processes and relied upon by users.

4. Be sure to leverage marketing tools.

With cookies and retargeting campaigns, you can market your product to potential new users, educate existing and new users on how to use your tech and ensure that existing users are aware of your enterprise features. You can even automate this process and identify community influencers with automated tools (like GHRR or OSS Insights).

In your marketing collateral, you should have a simple table to illustrate the features available in your free and commercial versions. Here are couple examples from InfluxData* showcasing the benefits of each tier:

5. Know that telemetry is your friend.

Many open-source creators are resistant, or even fearful, of collecting data on how their tools are being used. But trust me, it’s not as scary or difficult as it seems — you just need a simple disclaimer that you’re collecting telemetry data. And it is so worth it.

This information can teach you so much about how people use your features: Who is using them, how often, in which environment and where the features are breaking. You can even optimize your platform by asking users how it performed and whether they are happy with it. This telemetry data will give you valuable hints as to customer satisfaction, potential bugs and areas for improvement. It can also show you how many people within an organization are using your open-source product, which can be a powerful indicator of how likely they are to upgrade to a commercial option.

Many OSS tools will track product type and version, license information, installed plug-ins, UUID and third-party systems used in connection with the product, performance, scale, response times, used features and more. This data can teach us how the product is used and what are the most popular deployment methods.

Please note: It is important to ensure that you have an updated privacy policy, comply with privacy regulations and have opt-in/opt-out capabilities for users who would not like to share usage data.

In conclusion, from optimizing your onboarding process to leveraging social proof, these techniques will help you to drive more engagement, and ultimately, grow your business. Whether you’re just starting or if you’re looking to take your open-core SaaS to the next level, these tips will help you to achieve your goals.