Many companies aspire to build communities around their products, as these communities are often formed by true believers—people who have intrinsic motivation to contribute, such as by evangelizing the product wherever they go. However, I’ve noticed that many companies, especially in the developer tooling space, attempt to take shortcuts by throwing money at the problem to build these communities. Things don’t work like that.

Money can buy a false sense of community. People may gather because you send them freebies or because they follow what an influencer, paid by you, says about your product. But this engagement fades when the money stops flowing. Their motivation is purely extrinsic, and there’s nothing in your product that makes them stick around. You're just a sales-oriented company. If you truly cared about community, you’d build your company around it from the start, not the other way around.

Building a community takes time. It requires putting people first, being open to them, and involving them in how your product is shaped. Interestingly, involving them also brings a diversity of ideas, which can improve your product. It also means building for the community without expecting anything in return. Using your privileged position to commoditize the space reveals a lot about your values. When you care about advancing the ecosystem and inviting others to participate, everyone wins—the community, the ecosystem, and ultimately, you. But when you only focus on your own gain, greed may become your worst enemy, whether that happens down the road, or after you’ve exited or gone public and can claim you've succeeded.

Many challenges faced by tech organizations aren’t technical, but social. It’s not just about how big or crowded a market is or how feasible a technical solution might be, but about how willing you are to focus on your community and gain their trust by building for them without expecting anything in return. I’ve noticed that many companies aren’t willing to do this, and that’s why they fail in the long run. It’s inconceivable for them to do something without an immediate return.

And this doesn’t necessarily mean going open source. Look at Fly.io—they offer incredibly valuable resources for free, which they create themselves, rather than paying for low-quality content like I’ve seen other companies do. They also hired and provided a safety net to maintainers of popular projects, like Phoenix in the Elixir ecosystem, indirectly supporting the community and the broader ecosystem. You can also earn a community’s respect and trust by betting on open standards instead of locking users into your product. This is especially important when building for developers, who understand the significance of standards and their role in the long-term health of the ecosystem. If your solution is walled off, developers might use it out of necessity, but sooner or later, someone will come along with a solution built on different values, and your entire platform could fall apart.

For seven years, we were privileged to have jobs while working on Tuist on the side. Our focus was on solving problems, advancing scalable app development, and building tools that others could build upon. Now, we are working on turning this into an open business that embraces the same values. It requires setting the right boundaries in certain areas, but if we get it right, we’ll continue building these tools while supporting the communities we serve. This isn’t about trying to dominate every corner of the app development space. It’s about building a healthy business that supports the communities we’re building for.

We are embedding seven years of open-source experience into how we’re shaping this company. Though our progress might be slow at first, we see this as a marathon. We’ll keep running and building for the long term.