parthacus

all that i wanted to say, only better.

i am a zero-to-one guy and i get that this kind of positioning is often forward-looking, but i think that's what early-stage founders get wrong, especially if they aren't core whatever-noun they are anchoring to.

if you consider all other incumbents in this space, they are all AI-driven. your differentiator could be AI only if you are core AI and have drawn up models for project or work management use cases. otherwise, just stick to whatever your differentiators are in the near-term and change positioning later when you are core AI.

Taskade did this well. Notion is doing it well. they are all pivoting around AI without trading off whatever's their core.

is legit for one-half of open source, for sure. the other half is funded, COSS-by-design companies that do scale on product and the paid companies that you are talking about.

something interesting you will notice even with those companies---GitLab, Hasura, Strapi, even Cal.com come to mind---is that they too get flak for feature-flagging, restricting paid features to closed repos for a period, and making choices that help them sustain. the beginning of open source led to a synonymization of the term with everything-free-forever and it continues despite the number of projects that have died or tuned closed-source and the founders that have stopped maintaining their repos.

weird how we'd much rather have projects die than advocate for their sustainability, but it is what it is.

so good to see this here. you haven't done justice to how simple Plane is to get started. tools like Jira and others almost mandate tribal knowledge before seeing value. Plane is an example of good first principles thinking and progressive learning on the job. wish you all the success on your journey.