Bigger companies like H&M and Amazon are "open sourcing" their processes
Companies like H&M and Amazon are beginning to share their tech and processes with other businesses, which is almost a "norm" among indie hackers. Milestones and interviews are good examples.
Question is, is there generally a strong case for or against being open with your technology (or even your revenue, in the case of "open startups)"?
Edit: I originally linked to this story from the Financial Times without realizing it was behind a paywall.
@arvidkahl opened up a good discussion about this recently as it relates to revenue transparency.
I generally think that the main benefits of being open (from a self-interest standpoint) are in the marketing and PR departments. It's very interesting and "newsworthy" when a company shows how the sausage is made — or how much the sausage is making for a company. And this interest draws attention, eyeballs, and hopefully more users and revenue!
But other benefits come in the form of community and collaboration. When you let people see what's under the hood, they serve as a second set of eyes and can help you fix and improve things. They also tend to be more forgiving of mistakes. More "on your team," so to speak.
On the other hand, the costs are obvious:
My concern about openness in the beginning is customer trust.
If I think about it as a consumer... Would I give my business to this random dude with like 5 customers?
Right. Depends on the product and market though. If you're building something where users have to entrust you with a lot of sensitive information, or if your product risks saving (or losing) them a lot of cash, you're probably better off staying behind the curtain and coming across as a team of proven professionals.
But a lot of indie hacker products are a bit lower stakes than that. And if the "random dude" is active with blogging or social media, the "randomness" gives way to "cool," "relatable," "approachable", and best of all: "accessible" (from, say, a customer support perspective).
But yes: I'd imagine there's plenty of overlap between the sorts of people who knowingly buy from "open startups" and the sorts of people we might call "early adopters."
Totally agree with the approachableness. The concern is more around herd mentality in the very initial stages.
Well they are using a very loose definition of "sharing" in those articles.
"Amazon announced that it would share its cashless checkout system with retail rivals." = Amazon is allowing outsiders to license their in-house tech, similar to what they have been doing with Amazon Web Services for a long time.
"H&M is [..] debuting Treadler, a new supply-chain sharing service that will allow smaller brands to utilize its infrastructure from development to delivery" = Similar to Dropshipping or whitelabel OEM production, you can now use H&M as your OEM producer.
So to me, that is nowhere close to being comparable with sharing internal knowledge about your start-up for free. It's more "sharing" in the sense that an Uber driver is sharing his car with me: because I pay for his services.
Exactly!
This is all about turning infrastructure into a product, like Amazon's AWS, right?
I'd L O V E to see some kind of organized open-souring around business processes used by companies like that.
Anyone got a link that’s not behind a paywall
Oops! I somehow didn't hit that paywall on my first go-round.
This one should be accessible: https://www.fastcompany.com/90472018/hm-joins-the-open-innovation-craze-with-a-plan-to-share-its-production-chain-with-rivals