Knowing Your Problem Space is the Moat with Adam Jacob

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Adam Jacob, co-founder and CEO of the Swamp Club.

The first thing we talked about was When To Quit. System Initiative, Adam’s second company (after Chef), was one he ultimately shut down after deciding that he just didn’t have product-market fit. The idea of when to quit is an important one — I personally like Annie Duke’s book on the subject. We all have limited time and energy, and knowing when to abandon one project (or pivot from an experiment that isn’t working, etc) is an important one. In Adam’s case, he decided to take something he’d been working on at System Initiative and pursue it as a stand-alone company instead of chugging along with something that seemed to not be working. Knowing the difference between the common challenges around building a company and the signs that it’s just not going to work is absolutely not easy.

Adam also argues that in an era when software has become easier than ever to rebuild, it’s also more important than ever for software to be open source, because now more than ever, your code and your feature set is not your moat. Community is your moat. What’s really exciting about Swamp Club is, for example, the people in the Discord sharing what they are building, both with Swamp’s software as well as with other tools.

Adam had a lot of other things to say, like how the final code is actually an expression of how well you understand the problem space. But of course we talked directly about how AI has changed the collaboration mode in Swamp’s open source community, and what that means for how the open source project itself gets built.

We also talked about establishing a clear value proposition for the community itself, one that is different from the value proposition of using the software. If community is your moat, this is something to pay attention to; the overlap between people who use the software and people who are active in the community is not perfect, and you can have people who don’t even use the software who hang out in the community regardless.

If you’re still struggling on questions around understanding your customers’ problem space, figuring out the core value proposition for your software and/or your community, and in general establishing a moat that is not just your code, you should reach out… this is what I help companies with.