Creating an ecosystem with Ashraf Samhouri

This week on the The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ashraf Samhouri, the CEO and co-founder of Activepieces.

Activepieces didn’t start as an open source company — and we started out the conversation by talking about why it was important to take an open source route because Activepieces is building an ecosystem.

Some other highlights from the episode:

• Making software that is both for technical users (engineers love Activepieces!) and non-technical users (who also love Activepieces, because the UI is good)
• Understanding the different user types, and marketing to them separately and specifically.
• I challenged Ashraf to tell my why Activepieces is better than Zapier even without the open source piece — it was a challenge, but he made a good argument about having a simpler interface as well as that Activepieces allows you to run on-prem
• We talked about product led growth and how there is an obvious starting point for promoting an open source project
• Why lead qualification is so important

If you’re the founder of an open source company and you’re struggling with your open source strategy, with your positioning of your product or project in the ecosystem or with communicating that value of your product and project, reach out — that’s what I help companies with.