Mage’s Open Source Journey: From Cloud Platform to Community-Driven Growth

Sometimes the best strategic decisions come from recognizing what your customers need before they do. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Tommy Dang revealed how Mage’s decision to open source their core technology wasn’t just a distribution strategy – it was a fundamental realignment with their market’s needs.

The Initial Cloud Platform

In late 2020, Mage launched as a cloud-hosted machine learning platform. “We built this Cloud hosted and we launched in early 2022,” Tommy explains. “It was great. We have paying customers, we had thousands of users sign up.”

But beneath these positive signals, they discovered something crucial about their market.

The Market Reality

“Although there’s an appetite for machine learning, a lot of these companies, they want to use machine learning, everybody wants to use machine learning,” Tommy notes. “But what we found is they actually struggled with a more urgent data challenge early in their journey. And it is just the movement of data, the transformation of data, the integration of data.”

This insight led to a pivotal decision. Rather than continuing to push their full platform, they decided to focus on the foundational problem their customers needed to solve first.

The Open Source Pivot

“We took one of the core technologies we built internally, because our platform behind the scenes was composed of several pieces,” Tommy shares. “We took the data pipeline piece, spent a couple of months working on open sourcing that.”

The hypothesis was simple: if companies needed this fundamental capability first, making it openly available would accelerate adoption. The market response proved them right.

Rapid Community Growth

“We open sourced that earlier this year, and it’s been catching on like wildfire,” Tommy reveals. The metrics tell the story: “We have over 2000 stars, over close to four to 500 Slack members in the community. We have over a dozen or so companies that we know of that are using it in production.”

Even more telling, Tommy adds, “There’s quite a bit of others using in production as well. Just folks that are mentioning it here and there. But we don’t track telemetry data at the moment. So there should be quite a bit more usage out there that we just aren’t even aware of.”

Building Trust Through Transparency

The open source strategy aligned perfectly with Mage’s focus on building trust. By making their code open and accessible, they allowed developers to inspect and validate their solution themselves. This transparency, combined with their high-touch community engagement, created a powerful foundation for growth.

“People know the team, everyone who’s using it knows us. They know the community, they know the dedication, they know the pedigree, they know the history, the experience of the founders and of the founding team,” Tommy explains.

The Future Model

Looking ahead, Mage plans to maintain their commitment to open source while developing sustainable revenue streams. “We don’t have a cloud hosted version right now,” Tommy shares. Their 2023 monetization strategy will include “a cloud hosted version, hybrid deployment where they deploy in their cloud and we charge management fee and then enterprise specific features.”

This approach allows them to maintain the trust and accessibility of open source while building a sustainable business. The core technology will “always be free,” Tommy emphasizes, ensuring that individual developers can continue to use and contribute to the platform.

For B2B founders, Mage’s journey offers valuable insights about product strategy and community building. Their willingness to open source their core technology wasn’t just about distribution – it was about aligning their go-to-market strategy with their customers’ fundamental needs. By making their solution more accessible and transparent, they’ve built a foundation for both community growth and commercial success.