How a Rebrand Increased Sales with Lukas Gentele

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Lukas Gentele, the CEO and co-founder of LoftLabs.

Here’s some of the things we covered:

• There are many open source projects at LoftLabs. We talked about what the team did differently the second time round, when they’d had the experience of creating the first project under their belt, and why they continued creating additional projects after that.
• How they make roadmap decisions to decide what goes in the OSS versus what goes in the enterprise edition
• How they thought about the benefits to the business from open sourcing vCluster, the second project they released, and whether or not the theory about how it would benefit the business ended up being correct.
• Whether or not open code is necessary for community building, and why. In particular, we talked about the difference in how people feel ‘ownership’ of open source projects when they contribute to them.
• The pros and cons of building different brands around your project, your product and your company; and of having different brands around your different projects. We talked about this a lot; LoftLabs has a different company brand from any of the products or projects, but they discovered that if the project and product do not have the same brand, people get so confused that they ultimately do not buy.

If you need to figure out how to brand your project and product, you might want to work with me. If you want an opportunity to talk with other founders about branding, community building, and more, you should join us at Open Source Founders Summit May 19th and 20th in Paris.