Make money with open source software

About Alvaro Trigo
Alvaro Trigo is a web developer who could quit his full-time job due to his popular open source software FullPage.js.

Read the whole episode "Make money with open source software" (Transcript)

[If you want, you can help make the transcript better, and improve the podcast’s accessibility via Github. I’m happy to lend a hand to help you get started with pull requests, and open source work.]

[00:00:00] Michaela: Hello, and welcome to the software engineering unlocked podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michaela. And today I have the pleasure to talk to Alvaro Trigo, a web developer, who enjoys learning every day. But before I start, let me tell you about an amazing startup that is sponsoring today's podcast, Codiga. Codiga is a code analysis platform that automates the boring parts of code reviews and lets you merge with confidence on GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket.

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But now really back to Alvaro. Alvaro created his first website at the age of 16 and did not stop learning and perfecting his craft. One day, he started to make JavaScript plugins and well again, to learn and as an experiment.

And three years later, he earned enough from his experiment so that he could quit his job. When I last looked his library had 21,000, I think downloads per week on NPM. And today I'm super, super excited to talk with him and learn how he actually makes money with open source, how he could, you know, write something on the side so that he can quit his day job and become free and independent. So hello, Alvaro to the show. Welcome. And I'm really excited that you're here!

[00:01:46] Alvaro: Hello, Michaela. I'm happy to be here.

[00:01:49] Michaela: Yeah. So the last time I looked and this was 2020, right? The feed from 2020, it said like 21,000 downloads on NPM what is it now? Like? It must be even higher.

[00:02:02] Alvaro: Well, to be honest, I'm not sure I haven't taken awhile, so I don't know exactly, but, uh, so the similar, I guess I'm not very sure if the NPM stats are very representative anyways, but I think it's just a way to, to show that, you know, you can have quite weight broadcasts. If you do something, you know, by yourself in your own house, nowadays is quite easy to reach so many people and to influence people in some way, right. Or companies or whatever. So I think it shows the power of open source in time.

[00:02:30] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. So this is exactly what I want to deep dive a little bit into the power of open source. Right? I think the power of remote work. Yeah. It's something that I'm very fascinated with and with the pandemic, I think a lot of people now really understood what's going on here, but what about open source?

So, how did you even come up with the idea and maybe we should also explain my listeners ,well, a little bit what you were building, it's called full page GS. Right? And as I understood it, it's like a webpage that goes over our website that goes over the full page and it's easy to set up. And?

[00:03:03] Alvaro: um, it's a component that allows developers to create these kinds of websites, where you have like a full screen kind of slider that snaps to each of the sections. So when I created that, the page wasn't very popular yet it became very popular because I realized that almost at the same time that apple released the page for iPhone five C the iPhone five C website was using these kinds of effects. So I think then people started searching for these kinds of effects and, and they were able to find my component.

So, how did they come up with the idea? Well, I, I didn't actually think too much about it. I wanted to create a component just to learn by myself. I wanted to keep on practicing jQuery at the time because the first version was a jQuery plugin. It wasn't vanilla JavaScript. And well, I just came up with this idea that I thought it was cool because I was making a website in my company.

At the time my boss told me, I, want kind of like a very simple website, kind of like a PowerPoint presentation. And then I, I researched it. Then I came up with this idea that, uh, I took from different websites. And then after creating the website, I thought, well, this was quite difficult for me. I was trying to find for a component to do these kinds of websites and it doesn't exist.

So it might be a good idea for me to create the components and see if other people find it also interesting,because it would save them lots of time. And that's what I did. And then it started getting some traction on GitHub. I remember one day seeing that it had like 500 more stars on GitHub and I didn't even push it too much. So I was quite surprised and then, uh, just kept moving.

[00:04:35] Michaela: Cool. And so did you, 'cause I, I looked on, on your GitHub profile in the size now, GDPs and GPL, right. Was that the initial license also that you looked up and you thought this is the right thing. Did you already think that you want to commercialize it a little bit?

Did you want to make money by having people that use it commercially?

[00:04:57] Alvaro: No, not at all. My whole purpose was just to, to keep on learning and at the same time to get the motivation for myself to, to, to keep on learning, to do something useful for others and that, you know, well, it makes you very excited about that and it needs to lead. It was under the MIT. Because that's what most open source kind of use right? In JavaScript the spectrum. And they they're all, when I decided to start commercializing it is when I made the change to GPL person three, because I thought it was going to be more suitable.

[00:05:26] Michaela: Yeah. It's also my license, like you know it's the Apache like years before it was the Apache.

And now it's always the MIT that I, that I use for open source to give a lot of freedom to the user. Right? And so does it mean that if you already licensed it before under MIT like that's the previous versions, is it still licensed under that, or the new things are under GPL or how does that work? I'm not really familiar with it.

[00:05:51] Alvaro: This licensing thing is quiet complicated, to be honest. I'm not really an expert on the topic, but yeah, I guess what happens is so full page version one and version two, they're under the MIT license, you're going to still find them under their releases sites in GitHub, and then after that I changed to GPL. I don't know how that legally works or I don't know exactly how it does, but.

[00:06:16] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. I probably, it will work like this, at least. That's what I thought, but I'm also not, I'm not a lawyer. I have no idea about it, but,

[00:06:25] Michaela: and so, so how long, because there's also another tweet of yours and you were saying, well, I started to play around with that experiment with JavaScript plugins and so on. And now three years later, I actually quit my full-time job. How long did that really go? And where the times where you thought. This could be something or, you know, a lot of a long time where you just did it for fun, but never imagined that it's, you know, going to be your bread winning um income?

[00:06:56] Alvaro: yeah. Well, at first I couldn't even imagine that I was like, somebody would be able to live out from, from these kinds of things.

So I guess it's kind of not right to me. I was working on it for free for three years under the MIT license. You know, at some point you start getting a bit, you have to take the seasons like, should I keep on improving this or go for a barbecue with my friends. Right. Or, uh, so that has been extra hours doing this after work or so that just chill with my housemates or my friends or whatever.

So, you know, at the beginning it's very exciting. You, you get people using it and that excites you a lot. And then, um, you know, provides you some, um, help to keep on improving it. At some point you start having to work on it when you don't actually feel like working on it. Right.? Because people keep on requesting new features or they have bugs, very specific bugs that almost look like you are doing free consultants services for them. Right. And that's when I thought, well, you know, maybe I can try to get something out of it. I got motivated by another developer it's called, I don't know how to pronounce it either

I think it's DeSandro, he created Flickity, Masonry and another popular JavaScript components. He was providing them the licenses for them paid licenses. I went into those, I read the bit how he was doing, and then I thought that I could do it as well. And that's when I started charging for not for the product itself, but for paid extensions to the plugin.

So they were non-opensource like extensions that I was selling on top of the open source project.

[00:08:24] Michaela: Yeah, yeah. That's a good idea.

[00:08:27] Alvaro: So that's how it just started. And then I saw people start buying them and that's what motivated me to keep on going. And then I noticed that I was more, I was feeling better about it all. Like if somebody reported a bug or wants this new feature or whatever, then I wouldn't be so bothered about it because now I knew I was getting something in return.

So I think this way it works a bit better. Like when you can take the time to do something and you get compensated for that. And then you don't feel as bad because you can, you're not just wasting your free time. You're actually doing something in your , well, work time, I guess. And that's a win-win for both sides, for the developer and for the users who get better support, better features, you know, better response times.

So I started sending the licenses, sorry that, um, extensions. And then after six months of doing that, I was able to quit my job. And then after a year or so is when I decided to also change the whole project and our license and try, charging for the, for the license itself for commercial use, for non open source projects.

[00:09:33] Michaela: Yeah. I think that it's really, really important that, you know, projects, you know, that they are sustainable, especially if you have some success with it, right. Because. There is more and more time that you're spending on it. And I think that, you know, nobody, like if it's a hobby and you're spending one or two hours per week or something, this, this idea doesn't come up. Right?

But if it gets, as you said, if you have more users, you're getting more requests, you're getting more ideas maybe for features. So you're spending more and more time. And obviously, I mean, we all have to live somehow. Right? Um, obviously you have to think a little bit about how can I actually. You know, make that maybe my, my job.

And I think, especially if you like something, that would be like a win-win. So yeah, I can totally understand that. Another question that I had for you when you were, when you were turning that around, I saw you have really big names. You have big names on your website for companies that are using full-page gs.

Yes, right. There was like a Google, eBay, Coca Cola, Sony, and so on. Right. Did they all purchase a commercial license? Um, you know, did you reach out to them when you changed your licensing model and your, you know, your monitization idea around that? Did you reach out to them and say, you know, I'm actually licensed now for that?

[00:10:48] Alvaro: So, some of them are using my license. That's how I managed to discover, uh, website. Cause when you use the license for, when you buy an extension, you have to register it for a specific domain. Extensions of a different price, depending on how many domains you wanted, you want to use the extension for those. That's how I use for some of them all there's I think I just discovered them by chance and they might not be using the license.

So it depends, but no, I, I didn't reach when somebody buys an extension or a license for the product, now I get their email. Um, I get to notify them about dates or changes. So yeah, when I release a new version i notify all of my previous customers and told them about that, that if they were not previous customers, they didn't get a notification.

If they were using the previous version, they can keep on using that forever and nothing's going to change in their sites.

[00:11:37] Michaela: OK. And so what's preventing people from using. The new version and not buying a license?

[00:11:45] Alvaro: Well, I guess some people, some people might not know that there's a more recent version and others, I guess they they're happy with their website and they don't want to touch it at all.

So they don't even want to bother to update to the latest version. Others they might not want to pay. It's not very expensive, it's quite cheap, but you know, there's all kinds of users, not only companies, but also freelancers or people who just make websites for fun. So that might be one reason because there's no other good reason to not update because it's totally compatible.

You don't have to almost change anything in your code. I think it's just one line, if, so.

[00:12:19] Michaela: but my question was more, um, are there people that are updating and not paying if they use it commercially or is that not possible? Do you have some prevention mechanisms around that? What I mean is that, can I, you know, can I be a little bit cheat, cheat your system?

[00:12:36] Alvaro: Yeah, you totally can. And there's not much that we can do about that. I mean, yeah. For example, I discovered there was a McDonald's website in Russia making use of the new version of the plugin with a new license and they were not paying for it. And there was a warning if you opened the JavaScript console.

You were able to see a red warning say, Hey, is this somewhere is not licensed. You can get the license here. There's there's not much that I can do about that. Uh, sometimes you can try to send, I think they're called DMCA notices to Google or to some marketplaces to take down some of the stuff at, you know, I cannot be bothered for ten dollars.

[00:13:13] Michaela: Yeah. So you are more focused on, um, directing your energy to creating more value for your users and, you know, doing what you like and not so much bothered with, with the thefts and, uh, you know, trickeries and things like.

[00:13:27] Alvaro: I bother a little bit, but I try not to bother too much. It is true that with extensions, with, uh, extensions to that, to the main components in those, you have to register each of them for different domains.

So you actually have more like, um, yeah, there's kind of like a more sophisticated license key that you cannot trick so easy that that's only on extension. I don't want to enforce that on the product because then it will be too much of burden for many people and I think things are ok.

[00:13:57] Michaela: Yeah. And I mean, I think I would probably draw a line a little bit between, as you said, smaller, you know, maybe individuals that even though I'm mean $10, come on, but you know, like if then they're like larger organizations like Google or E-bay, using it, in addition to this small fee, really small fee for you, are they providing some support? Do you get some sponsorship like there's GitHub sponsors or something, or do you have other ways to, to support your work?

[00:14:26] Alvaro: Well, what I do is I also know I don't, I don't do sponsors and they don't usually get support unless they go for a higher, higher license.

They do get support with extensions. All kinds of tiers get support for those, but not for the main license. And also what I do to get money from different places is also, uh, I sell, uh plugins for wordpress. I know you also do some affiliate things. And I also have another plugin that I also commercialized. So I have a few things that also drive money and not only the full bit licenses also like extensions, which are not opensource.

Yeah. And, uh, well, uh, I just remember that another way that, um, many people don't even bother to get a license is because they don't know very well how the GPL license works or, uh, you know, they are not very up-to-date about license, terms and stuff. So they don't even know that they have to purchase the license or they didn't even know what is considered opensource or how to add a license to their own private.

So, this is a big issue that I see, especially on small developers, freelancers.

[00:15:31] Michaela: Um, so you were talking about plugins. Is it like a package or is it like a plugin? What is the difference here?

[00:15:37] Alvaro: So well, back in the days every time you made a component for jQuery, it was called a plugin, plugin for jQuery.

And nowadays I tend to call it the library and JavaScript library, but yeah, also, um, the, I talk about plugins for wordpress. Because a WordPress, you know they have these kind of plugin stuff and then it's the plugin that incorporates the library and allows you to do certain things and you have a little interface. So it's not just for something on top of the components. That allows you to do things through an interface, and kind of like the word press way.

[00:16:12] Michaela: Yeah, so when you were right at the beginning, you said, well, I tried to do that for my, you know, for my boss and try to implement that. And I was surprised how difficult it actually is. Right? I'm, I'm really in the same situation because I ported two websites from wordpress to Gatsby now. Right. And I was like, oh, I studied excited, uh, you know, generator and gets me super supported and so on. And I completely underestimated how long it will take, right? Even though there are so many plugins or, you know uh, you know, components that you can use. But just even researching which plugin to use,then writing the query really adopting it to your thing.

I mean, it's like, it really blew out of hand. And even though their websites are, you know, now almost done, it's like always like, oh, this little bit, you know, still like that, you even have to think about. I'm like, yeah, for work, like with word press, I was not so happy because it's slow and I didn't want to be bothered with, you know, going around PHP and, you know, changing something in the back end to improve my speed.

And then the loading time of each page really was annoying. So I thought like, okay, I'm going to do a Gatsby website, and then I will have everything with markdown files and, you know, directly gets them from the file system and it took me, actually no time almost right? To have that set up because there are already like start-up packages and then, you know, like, but then the small things like that, the canonical link is direct, you know? It's horrible.

Yeah. That I have a site map and then I have the keywords and I completely underestimated that. So, yeah, I totally understand. So if I want to use full page now in my Gatsby website, is that. Is that a thing? Can I do that? Would that make sense?

[00:17:59] Alvaro: Yeah, I guess, I mean, well, I don't know what your site looks like. Is it more like a blog?

[00:18:05] Michaela: Um, it's mainly a blog, but it's not only a blog. It also has like a run pages, right? Where landing pages and so on. I think for the landing page, probably something that - so if you go -

[00:18:17] Alvaro: yeah, I mean, you, you could, you could totally use it. Yeah. It's just basically a JavaScript library, so you can initialize it, wherever you want.

[00:18:24] Michaela: And then it's mainly about the look and feel. Yeah.

[00:18:28] Alvaro: So yeah, what it makes is that allows you to create this snap scrolling experience, uh, full screen. So, um, well of course it is much more complex than that. It has many more options that you can configure. You have hash URLs, you have history back and forth. You have the lazy load, you have, uh, play, um, pause of media elements. You have many more. Right?

[00:18:49] Michaela: And I think this is it, right? So first you think, oh, what is it? Right. And it's really small. And now I'm like, I have this blog and I'm thinking like, if I'm in my blog and I mark anything, then I would like to pop up that says, share it on Twitter and so on.

And then realized, yeah.

[00:19:04] Alvaro: Yeah, exactly. So the very basic functionality seems very easy, always to implement by yourself. And then 20% of the extra features that you want. Those are what takes the most time.

[00:19:17] Michaela: Takes lot of time. Yeah, exactly. Like, and then you want to have like previous, you know, previous article, next article, and then this is not good enough because you want it by category. Right? And so, yeah.

So another thing that I was thinking a lot about and reminds me also of your success stories, and there are, I mean, there are similar success stories. I think now more and more popping up right around the internet is that 10 years ago, If you ask somebody to pay one Euro or dollar or whatnot, or 10 for something, they would like crazy.

I mean, everything was free and it was like software should not cost any money. And I think, especially in the last two years, three years, it completely changed. I mean, if there are like Google was You know, sunsetting, most of them products that are for free, right. And then the ecosystem completely changed into this SaaS businesses.

But also that you have more and more smaller, I would say, yeah, smaller, independent developers also really making money for their, for their software. Right. And suddenly I feel like, okay, we have to pay for everything. It's getting really expensive. Like for my website, if I don't want to use Google analytics. Right? Which is free. And this is like the, you know, 10 years ago, mindset, like let's use Google, Google analytics, and now the mindset is, oh, we don't want to use Google analytics. So what else do we have here? And then I find like 10 different analytics platforms, but they're all atleast $20. And I'm like, okay, this is for my private blog.

It, you know, it's already, it's already a lot, right? Because it's not only the analytics that you need, you need a lot of things, but I see that people are starting to value software more. What's your experience here?

[00:20:58] Alvaro: At the beginning, it wasn't common at all to transfer these things. And now it's getting a bit more common, right?

But still on the JavaScript environments, especially in the front end side of the office is not yet to come on to transfer these kinds of things. You see libraries, components of all kinds, but usually they tend to be free because I think one of the main reasons is it's not easy to protect in some way, like the code is it's free. Everybody can see the code when it's front-end. So it's very difficult to protect something like that. And when you can not protect it, I guess if that's the make or some people think it doesn't make much sense to charge for it. But yeah, I know a few libraries that are starting to charge for demonstrable libraries, but yeah, it's still not very common.

I think it's more common for other kinds of products for backend stuff for kind of like subscription services. But I think it still needs to improve more in that regard, because I think it's been a, so like sometimes when you don't see this, when you don't see that the owner or the, creator of the component is getting some benefit out of it, then it's easier to see projects in GitHub that will get unmaintained or you know, that they will eventually die or get obsoleted or whatever, because you know, somebody can not keep a maintaining forever. Some people think that you can create an open source project, publish it, and forget about it. But the publishing part is just the very beginning.

Then you have to keep on maintaining it and that's for years, like my component is now more than seven years old. And you have to keep on improving it and adding features and reporting and dealing with reports. And you know, so many people don't bother doing this. And then you see the, uh, the, you know, the last release was four years ago.

So it's not really a component that sometimes you can trust or you have to look for an alternative or you open a issue, and nobody answers.

[00:22:46] Michaela: So your experience with, you know, there's this rumor I'd say, or the anecdotes around customers and especially. You know, the free riders, they they're really like heavy maintainence customers that are asking a lot of things.

And then the people that are actually paying are, are much more moderate. And I mean, my experience is definitely like this. Whenever I provided things for free people come with this attitude that, you know, it's there, it's there. Right? Yeah. I mean, sometimes I get emails. Like I have a newsletter and you get an ebook, right that I wrote, if you, if you, for my subscribers. And sometimes they can't find their email in the spam, right. It goes in promotion or spam or whatnot. Right. It's not really my fault or something I can do. And I'm always, if somebody is, you know, writes me an email back and asks, you know, I didn't get it. I'm always going, doing the work to write them a personal email, send them the book. Right? But they are like you said and you didnt!

[00:23:44] Alvaro: Yeah totally, so aggressive sometimes right?

[00:23:49] Michaela: And for other things as well, what's your experience here?

[00:23:51] Alvaro: Yeah. You always get some people that is a bit aggressive a bit, uh, you know, they want everything for free they want you to work for them for free, doing consultancy, you fix their bugs that sometimes they are not even related with your own product. Right?

So, well, what I used to me do is just reply to them. Very politely, politely explain them the situation. Um, you know, always telling them, have you found a bug or you are not happy with this because you didn't pay for it. You know, then you can just go and check the code because it's open, you can check it yourself and does it go same?

Like everybody can check it and fix bugs if they find them. So I think, uh how many, this, an open source is also a way to, you know, move people in certain that I send and tell them, Hey, this is open source, you know? You know, you're taking advantage of it, but it's also good because you can fix your own issues, right? If you have them. So that's what I do sometimes. And all the times you just tell them, well, if you need my help, you can always upgrade to a, you know the business license, and then I'll provide you an hour support or whatever. So I give them the options and that's it. Yeah. You only did some, some angry people, the money so much, if they're angry and they paid for it and they are not happy because there's a bug that I cannot fix, for example, then I'm happy to refund them. You know, if I can not find, uh, fix their bugs, you know, that, that makes sense to me. But otherwise, if they're not paying anything, then, you know, I help them to, to some extent, but not, you know, there, there are some limits.

[00:25:13] Michaela: Yeah. So how much of your work day now is really, are you still programmer is still a developer in your mind or are you now, uh, you know, like you are a salesperson already or, you know, like an admin person. Yeah. You know, how do you feel like in your, in your entrepreneurial journey right now?

[00:25:33] Alvaro: I don't know. I think I like to consider myself business person more than a developer.

It is true that i am a developer and, uh, you know, I have the background is, and I keep on developing the product. Uh, actually I'm about to release a new major version. That's it is also true that I don't spend. My whole time developing anymore. Like, uh, I just have to do marketing. I have to do content marketing and I have to do, you know, taxes.

Uh, you have to do all kinds of things like images. Uh, you have to think about potential new opportunities. You have to think about the license system. You have to think about, I don't know, uh, so many kinds of things. So yeah, I guess I, I like to consider myself more as a, as a business person. I would like to maybe eventually in the future delegate parts of the developing side to somebody else that is even better than me.

And so other people can Benefit from that, you always try to look for the best outcome and sometimes it's also good to get rid of yourself from certain tasks.

[00:26:34] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. True. Yeah. So I don't know. Um, I couldn't find anything about, um, how much you're making per month or per year. I'm also not sure if you're sharing something publicly.

Some people do, some people don't, you know, I'm totally going with whatever you decide. Do you share it? Do you say how much you're making with it or can you give us an idea?

[00:26:56] Alvaro: in my case I prefer not to be very open about it just because, you know, it's open source, so anybody can just see my code and create another project.

And I started doing the same, so, and that's one of the reasons if I had the SaaS, you know, a backend product or whatever, I wouldn't mind, but right now I prefer to be more private on these aspects. So, uh, you know, we can say that I get enough to live comfortably. And that I have different sources of income. That's an, all, everything comes from the main component and it also comes from the plugins for, for WordPress, from affliate links that I have for selling other WordPress themes from supporters, from consultant services from, and now I'm also starting a blog as well, which I'm also expecting to monetize in some way. So yeah.

[00:27:41] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's really good to have multiple income streams. I also try to have more than one, at least for me, it gives me a little bit, um, Ease of mind that, you know, if something dries up or doesn't work out so well, maybe SEO doesn't work or, you know, something else comes a copycat, as you said, right? You have other opportunities as well. So yeah, I can totally understand that. Cool. So I think I probably, there are a couple of listeners that. Are also like wants more freedom, or at least, you know, a side project that gives some side income. What's your advice for them? What would you do like now you're in that game for a long time or is it seven years? What do you think? Is there what's the right time right now to start something, you're saying a blog?

[00:28:25] Alvaro: Oh, the right time, the right time is always there because some people are still waiting to finish that course to finish that book to become better. And, uh, you know, to master a certain technology, I don't think thats the way you have to take this the way you have to do. You know, do your best, be whatever, you know, and you will probably end up helping somebody. When I created my project, I wasn't an expert developer in jQuery. I created it because I wanted to keep on learning and creating something useful was what was a good motivation for me.

And I think that's what the people have to do. Well, yeah, I haven't the same when I created my first website, I do it. I created it using Microsoft Word. I didn't know how to code. I didn't know anything about websites, but I had a teacher that taught me how to make websites used to Microsoft word. And then I started seeing people using the website and that's what motivated me to keep on learning. Right?

So the right time, I think it's always now just do whatever. Keep on improving it, keep on iterating, get feedback from people and they will tell you sometimes how to improve things, what features they will need to add, what bugs they found. So I think that's what really helped me. To improve my components at first.

Um, what I would say is that don't quit your job, do something on the side, see how it goes, get feedback. And then when you get some traction, you can decide to quit. In my case, I only decided to quit. When I saw that I was going to be able to keep on living from this. Took me six months can take more, can take less.

It depends on people, but I was working in on the side for three years. That's what I would recommend people to do it on the side, if they can, not get too crazy because you know, a great idea might not result in people buying your product. So, yeah, that's one of the things. And another thing that I think helped me a lot at the beginning was making it well, I was open source or let's say free - because when you have something for free, at least at the beginning, or you have a premium kind of product or something, you get much more exposure. Like people will blog about that. People will share it on Twitter, on Facebook, or so you create this kind of like snowball where, you know, the content keeps on spreading faster because it's free.

Unless you have a very good product and you can already charge for it or whatever, having it free at the beginning might be good because you not only get much more free marketing because you know, people don't mind certain stuff when they know that it's not free and nobody's going to really benefit out of it.

And you also get the feedback from the people. The more people that use it, the more feedback you get and the more you can improve it on different iterations. And then, you know, in the future, you always can start charging for it, release new versions or, you know, or even people to another area or whatever, but having that free feedback and that's free marketing, I think it's very powerful at the beginning

[00:31:12] Michaela: Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time, talking with me about your journey and, um, about how we could, uh, leverage open source to actually start our own little business and, uh, you know, get independent.

[00:31:25] Alvaro: Thank you for you for having me here.

[00:31:29] Michaela: Yeah, it was really great talking to you and, uh, thank you so much.

[00:31:34] Alvaro: Yeah, thank you so much Michaela.

[00:31:35] Michaela: Ok. Bye!

[00:31:37] Michaela: This was another episode of the software engineering unlocked podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please help me spread the word about the podcast. Send the episode to a friend via email, Twitter, LinkedIn. Well, whatever messaging system you use or give it a positive review on your favorite podcasting platform, such as Spotify or iTunes.

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