The Unleash Guide to Building in Public: Open Source Leadership in a Crowded Market
Trust isn’t built through marketing campaigns – it’s earned through consistent actions. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Egil Osthus revealed how Unleash’s commitment to transparency has helped them become the largest open source feature management platform in a competitive market.
Starting with Community
Most companies treat open source as a marketing strategy. For Unleash, it was their foundation. “It was launched as an open source because developers want to give back to community, share their code and really be part of a larger community,” Egil explains. This genuine commitment to community contribution shaped their entire approach to building in public.
Building Trust Through Transparency
Dealing with developers requires a different level of authenticity. “We are fortunate to deal with a very skilled audience or market. I mean, developers, they are bright people. They are seeing right through if we do not have integrity in what we do,” Egil notes.
This insight led Unleash to embrace radical transparency about their business decisions. “There is a very clear tension between the commercial drivers because we are hairful business for sure. At the same time there is a tension between a commercial aspect of the company and the open source side of the company,” Egil acknowledges. Rather than hiding this tension, they address it openly.
Curating Community Culture
Unleash takes an active role in shaping their community culture. “We always pick that version of the contribution that is having the author that is really truly living our values,” Egil reveals. This creates an environment where developers “feel welcomed, where you can kind of really exchange ideas, really challenge each other in a nice way to kind of lift up and have that growth mindset.”
Resisting Short-Term Pressures
Building in public means being transparent about difficult decisions. Even when their sales team pushes to “just slim down the open source, make it like as few features, no support, anything,” Unleash maintains their commitment that “open source needs to be the best product for developers, individual developers.”
Technical-First Communication
Instead of traditional marketing, Unleash focuses on technical enablement. Their approach involves “having technical people sitting together with developers, leaders, architects, similar kind of profiles, and really make them getting the most out of the product as absolutely possible, making their everyday life and processes as easy as absolutely possible.”
This technical focus extends to how they communicate about enterprise features. Rather than marketing speak, they clearly explain what’s available: “Some of the features, it’s very kind of obvious. Like single sign on. We do offer single sign on out of the box in enterprise. Other more kind of complex needs such as large number of projects, or multiple environments, or role based access control with custom roles mapped back to your ad or whatever kind of authentication tooling you’re using.”
The Results of Transparency
With 16.5 million Docker pulls and approximately ten thousand community members, Unleash’s transparent approach has clearly resonated. Their success offers valuable lessons for founders building in public:
- Start with genuine community value
- Be transparent about business decisions
- Actively shape community culture
- Maintain technical authenticity
- Resist pressure to compromise values
The path to market leadership in developer tools isn’t about having the biggest marketing budget or the most features. It’s about building genuine trust through consistent transparency and community engagement. As Unleash demonstrates, when you build in public with integrity, the market notices.