This Damon Chen guy seems like a nice guy but like an independent journalist or something. He seems like he could be a great evangelist.
He started some websites, wrote about Open Startups, and in this article he mentions he had his own 'revenue bar' on Twitter which went from $0 to $1 but he took it down because the age of Open Startups is over.
I look at all this and wonder where the actual dudes going to work at jobs are (no disrespect to those Open Startups who have made bank).
I am an entrepreneur so here is what the job looks like to me. I get up every day and I grind. Mostly that means working on new deals. I close as many of those as I can. When I have time I will call someone on my product team and ask them to walk me through what we're working on delivering next. I have a lot of feedback on that stuff because I come from a product background, but if I indulge that too much, I won't spend enough time on sales.
Sometimes I will look at what the couple of Ops contractors I have on payroll are doing (accounting HR etc.), and spot check their work for issues.
I don't know how any entrepreneur has the time to be off working on "movements." Some of the businesses in his post have higher ARR than me so maybe there's something for me to learn here. But in my reality being an entrepreneur basically means you're closing sales, making deals to increase your distribution, and trying to keep your product or service on track. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm getting old.
Entrepreneur is a very broad term. A power lifter may wonder why the boxer is doing footwork drills when he just needs to lift heavy weights until he realizes they’re both athletes but in different events.
It’s silly to label “open startups” as a movement when it’s more a technique which may or may not be useful to you.
By being open ,people can follow your story, which can translate to marketing/sales/feedback.
There’s also an aspect of idea exchange and psychological motivation by being part of an entrepreneurial community.
I think it’s silly to consider it a movement rather than a tactic. Whether it’s applicable depends a lot on whether it will help you reach potential customers. If you’re trying to sell fintech to big banks, probably not, if you’re selling no-code landing page builders, it probably will.
It’s also a bit of a pendulum where the business default is secrecy, new school thought says build in public, now people are realizing it’s just trade offs .
This has been a key part of many successful products such as Stack Overflow (Jeff Atwood’s blog), Basecamp (Signal V Noise blog). Convertkit is another one and has a really good interview on Indie Hackers about it.
Totally agree, it is odd that the author of the article labeled "open startups" as a movement. I can see why they did so, labeling it as a movement improves the story, makes you a "thought leader", etc, which all leads to better marketing / sales.
Reading between the lines I think you are an entrepreneur, rather than a startup founder? The key difference I imagine is you need to be a business at all times and so focus on operations, and a startup doesn't have to be a business yet, but does have to focus on self-image and projecting that image to investors to keep the gravy train flowing in.
My key takeaway from startups vs entrepreneurship is they are very different games, and I wouldn't want to conflate the two even in this discussion about transparency. Many businesses stand to gain nothing, and lose a lot, by exposing their business particulars. Startups on the otherhand can gain a lot from the self-promotion.
I’m very familiar with this space/movement. Most of these “open startups” are solo bootstrappers who use this audience building often as their main marketing channel
It only works well if you’re selling something useful to the bootstrapper crowd: bootstrapping courses, Twitter tools etc
He started some websites, wrote about Open Startups, and in this article he mentions he had his own 'revenue bar' on Twitter which went from $0 to $1 but he took it down because the age of Open Startups is over.
I look at all this and wonder where the actual dudes going to work at jobs are (no disrespect to those Open Startups who have made bank).
I am an entrepreneur so here is what the job looks like to me. I get up every day and I grind. Mostly that means working on new deals. I close as many of those as I can. When I have time I will call someone on my product team and ask them to walk me through what we're working on delivering next. I have a lot of feedback on that stuff because I come from a product background, but if I indulge that too much, I won't spend enough time on sales.
Sometimes I will look at what the couple of Ops contractors I have on payroll are doing (accounting HR etc.), and spot check their work for issues.
I don't know how any entrepreneur has the time to be off working on "movements." Some of the businesses in his post have higher ARR than me so maybe there's something for me to learn here. But in my reality being an entrepreneur basically means you're closing sales, making deals to increase your distribution, and trying to keep your product or service on track. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm getting old.