There is something I keep thinking about when I look at how companies try to get better at what they do. The default assumption is that improvement comes from within. You hire smart people, you listen to your customers, you study the market, and you iterate. That's the playbook. And it works, to a point.
But I think the companies that are positioned to build something truly great are the ones that go beyond that loop. The ones that create spaces where people can share their needs, their frustrations, their ideas. Not just customers. Not just employees. Anyone.
The space before the product
Open source companies, or companies that operate in the open more broadly, have an interesting advantage here. They usually start by building the space. The community. The culture of sharing. Before they even have a product worth paying for, they have people showing up and contributing ideas, reporting problems, suggesting directions. People get used to participating. It becomes natural.
What's beautiful about this is that the pool of ideas is no longer limited to who you hired or who signed a contract. You open yourself to a diversity of perspectives that you could never assemble internally. The people in your community come from different industries, different countries, different problem spaces. They see things you don't. They need things you haven't imagined. And if you've built the right kind of space, they tell you about it.
This is something we experience at Tuist all the time. Someone shows up and contributes a feature we never would have prioritized. Someone reports a bug in a workflow we didn't know existed. Someone translates part of our dashboard into a language we don't speak. These things happen because the door is open.
The myopia of pure monetization
Here is where it gets interesting for me. If your company exists to make money, and most companies do, capitalism has a way of narrowing your vision. The pressure from investors, the need for hyper-growth, the quarterly targets, all of it pushes you toward capitalizing on everything you can. Every interaction becomes a potential transaction. Every feature becomes a pricing lever.
At some point, it stops being about what your people need and starts being about what you need. And what you usually need is growth that satisfies the expectations you set with your investors. The product becomes a vehicle for revenue extraction rather than a tool that genuinely serves people.
I think this is where a lot of companies lose the plot. They build free trials and gated features and sales funnels, and they optimize every step of the conversion pipeline. But the only input they accept is from people who are already paying or who might pay soon. Everyone else is noise.
And that means they are missing out on the most creative, most unexpected, most valuable ideas. Because those ideas often come from people who have no commercial relationship with you at all. They come from someone who stumbled into your community because they were curious. From someone in a completely different field who saw an interesting parallel. From someone who just wanted to help because they believe in what you're doing.
What you get back
I'll be honest, it feels odd at first. Doing something and not expecting money back. Building something and giving it away. Investing time in people who may never become customers. It goes against everything the business world tells you to do.
But I think there is something powerful that happens when you allow for a different kind of exchange. What you get back is not money. It's ideas. It's bugs that would never have been reported otherwise. It's people going out into the world and sharing how happy they are using your tool. It's someone writing about you not because you paid them, but because they genuinely care.
None of this is directly measurable. You can't put it on a dashboard and say "this contributed X dollars to revenue." You can't attribute it to a marketing campaign. But it compounds. It compounds in ways that are hard to see in the short term but become undeniable over time. The trust builds. The community grows. The ideas keep flowing. And when you finally do build something worth paying for, you have an audience that already believes in you.
The ceiling problem
When the only input into your company comes through your customers and your employees, you have a ceiling. You might not feel it right away. The ideas might be good enough for a while. But over time, the pool gets shallow. You start telling the same story to your investors about increasing value for existing customers. You optimize what you have instead of imagining what you could have.
And then one day you need to expand into a new market, and you realize you don't have the people. You don't have the community. You don't have the go-to-market. Because you spent years building walls instead of doors.
I think people say that open source is riskier than ever, especially now with AI making it cheaper to replicate software. But I actually think it's more powerful than ever. Because through communities and people putting creative energy into different problem spaces, new business ideas emerge. Ideas you could never have generated internally. If you are completely closed, you are betting that the smartest people in the room are already in the room. And that's rarely true.
A different kind of company
I'm not saying you can disregard money entirely. There are people to pay, services to run, infrastructure to maintain. A company needs revenue to survive. But when every interaction is purely a monetary transaction, when you can't invest in something unless you can immediately capitalize on it, you close yourself off from the most interesting possibilities.
The free trial model, the gated feature model, the "talk to sales" model, they all assume that the only valuable exchange is a financial one. I think that assumption is wrong. And I think the companies that challenge it, that find a healthy balance between commercial sustainability and genuine openness, are the ones that will build the most creative, most innovative, most lasting products.
This is something I keep noticing. And it makes me wonder why more companies don't see it.
The pieces are there. The communities are willing. The ideas are waiting. You just have to be open enough to receive them.