Dub

Dub is an open source link management infrastructure, 10 reasons why you should open source your company, Fundraising news from Qdrant, Ingonyama, and Bittensor, Job opportunities at Posthog, Meilisearch, and n8n

Author

Jonathan Reimer
January 31, 2024

Welcome to a new edition of Open Pioneers - your weekly update from the forefront of open source. Today, we talk about:

  • Dub, an open source link management infrastructure

  • 10 reasons why you should open source your company - by Supabase CTO

  • Fundraising news from Qdrant, Ingonyama, and Bittensor

  • Job opportunities at Posthog, Meilisearch, and n8n

If you enjoy this week's post, it would make my day if you shared it with a friend or colleague.

🔍 Spotlight: Dub

Dub is an open source link management infrastructure and a modern alternative to Bitly, Linktree, and others. After the project was started at Vercel in October 2022, it quickly gained traction and collected over 14k stars on GitHub. The founder, Steven Tey, recently turned this side project into a startup and now focuses full-time on building Dub. The repository is available under the AGPL v3 license, but there is also a hosted version that you can sign up for.

Learn more about Dub: Website | GitHub | Twitter

🎙️ Interview with Steven (Founder of Dub)

Hi Steven! What is Dub, and which problem is it solving?

Dub.co is the link management infrastructure for companies to create marketing campaigns, link-sharing features, and referral programs. 

  • Easily create & share short links with insightful analytics into how your marketing campaigns are performing

  • Turn your Dub.co short links into referral links and track conversion events (e.g. signups, purchases, etc.)

  • Soon: Create beautiful & performant link-in-bio pages and showcase your best links

How did you come to start Dub?

Back in 2022, I built Dub.co as a side project to solve an internal need we had at Vercel – sharing links on social platforms (X, LinkedIn, and iMessage) with beautiful Open Graph images to improve click-through rates.

The product was fully open-source and quickly gained a lot of traction – it reached #1 on Hacker News and was even trending on GitHub for a little while.

Over the next 12 months, Dub.co continued to grow – mostly through word of mouth, without spending a cent on paid marketing.

You went from 0 to 10k+ GitHub stars in one year - without any team, funding, etc. What were the main drivers of growth?

It was a combination of the initial launch traction + word of mouth. We had a beautifully designed open-source product, and people would share it with their friends & colleagues.

What are 3 open source projects you look up to?

🔥 10 reasons why you should open source your company - by Supabase CTO

I recently stumbled across this excellent post by Supabase CTO & Co-Founder Ant Wilson from 2022. It discusses a question I frequently get: “Should I open source my company?”

Ant, as an open source founder obviously biased towards open source, highlights the following benefits of doing open sourcing a company:

  1. Faster feedback loop: Sharing code with the community leads to a more efficient feedback loop, improving code quality over time.

  2. Improved security: Adhering to Linus's Law, more eyes on the code means security issues are identified and resolved faster, leading to a more secure product.

  3. Faster iteration over ideas: Open sourcing allows for quicker iteration of ideas, focusing on execution rather than idea protection.

  4. Building a community of experts: It helps build a skilled community around the product, which is crucial for long-term success and innovation.

  5. Better access to talent: Open source projects attract talented developers already interested in contributing, simplifying the hiring process.

  6. Real-world candidate assessment: Contributions to open source projects provide tangible evidence of a candidate's skills and compatibility with the company's culture.

  7. User-driven feature development: Users of open source projects can contribute features and integrations, expanding the software's capabilities beyond the core team's focus.

  8. Avoiding redundant development: Open source encourages using and improving existing solutions rather than reinventing the wheel, leading to more efficient use of resources.

  9. Preparation for large-scale competition: Planning to compete with larger entities leads to a focus on areas like developer experience (DevEx) to maintain a competitive edge.

  10. Focus on core competencies: Open source allows companies to focus on what they do best, rather than expending energy on protecting intellectual property.

This list is not exhaustive, and I think there are a few areas that Ant didn’t touch - for example - the go-to-market advantages or the improved capital efficiency that goes with it.

Nevertheless, I think it’s a pretty good list of reasons. Perhaps I'll write a list of reasons NOT to use open source your company another time.

🦄 Open source startup radar

  • Qdrant, an open source vector database, announced a $28M Series A led by Spark Capital. Link

  • Ingonyama, a blockchain hardware startup that hosts open source libraries for zero-knowledge proof, announced $21M in funding. Link

  • OSS Capital announced they are committing $25M to invest exclusively in the Bittensor ecosystem. Bittensor is a decentralized network that's designed to connect machine learning models. Link

đź’Ľ Work in open source

  • Support Engineer (Remote/US) at Posthog Apply

  • Head of Developer Marketing (Remote) at Meilisearch Apply

  • Staff Backend Engineer (Remote EU/Berlin) at n8n Apply

Not a fit for you? Check out more opportunities at ossjobs.dev.

Until next week,

Jonathan (@jonathimer)