The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Building the Patreon for developers (Interview)

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Birk Jernström from Polar joins the show to tell us all about the creator platform for developers: why he built it, how it works, why it works how it works, what's in store for the future & we even give Birk some super deep UX feedback on the funding flow.

You're listening to The Change Log. Conversations with the hackers, the leaders, and the innovators of the software world. This week, we are talking with Burke Jernstrom about Polar, his new creator platform for developers with big ambitions. Burke hopes to take indie devs from their very first donation all the way to IPO, if that's what they want of course We hear all about it, the backstory how it works, why it works how it works what the future looks like

and even give Burke some super deep user experience feedback live on the air We hope you enjoy it as much as we did Quick mention of our partners at Fly.io the home of changelog.com. Fly is a platform that helps you launch your app as close to your users as possible for peak performance. That's usually pretty hard, but Fly makes it easy. Learn more at Fly.io.

Okay, Burke, Dernstrom, and Polar on the changelog. Let's do it. Alex Kretzner. He does an amazing job for Tailscale showing off all the cool things you can do with it. And recently he did a video on remotely accessing a Home Assistant instance via Tailscale. And you can do it totally free. Take a listen. Under Home Assistant, we're going to go ahead now and install another add-on. So I'm going to go ahead and install the Visual Studio Code server add-on. Whilst that's doing that I'm going to go ahead and go back to the Tailscale add-on that we installed earlier and just grab the piece of configuration that we're going to need from the documentation. In the documentation page do a command F or

control F and search the page for 127.0 and there you go. We just need these four lines of code here. Home Assistant by default blocks connections from untrusted proxies such as the tailscale proxy. In this case we're going to add the 127.0.0.1 as a trusted proxy in the list here. So I'm going to go ahead and copy this to my clipboard. I'm going to go ahead and click on start and then also show in the sidebar and you can see we're basically in Visual Studio Code but in a browser and this is running directly on Home Assistant and has access to your configuration files and what have you underneath. All we need to do is paste those four lines into our configuration.yaml file and restart Home

Assistant. So I've pasted the four lines, I'm going to go to the hamburger menu up here, click save and then settings and restart Home Assistant. We want to go back to the add-on section and under tailscale we're going to have to go to the configuration tab for the add-on and click on tailscale proxy this is going to turn on tailscale serve this is what will automatically generate you a tls certificate using let's encrypt for your tailnet.ts.net tailnet name so if i click on save here it will take a moment, but it's going to restart the Tailscale add-on. And so now I should be able to go to

https homeassistantvelocitraptor.ts.net and it's going to load my entire Home Assistant instance over Tailscale with a TLS certificate using the name from my tailnet. And I can log in just as if I was using the IP address and port number that I was before. And you can use this name from anywhere on your tail nets, any device that's connected to your tail net, such as a phone, for example, that can now connect to home assistant, whether you're in the house or whether you're at the

coffee shop or whether you're in Iceland, looking at volcanoes, it doesn't really matter where you are. If you're one of the few out there who have not tried out Tailscale yet for free, you can do so today up to 100 devices and three users totally free at Tailscale.com. No credit card required. Just go there, sign up,

get 100 devices, three users, totally free. That's where I'm at. I use Tailscale totally free and you can too. I'll link up Alex's tutorial in the show notes. Check that out. Tailscale.com. Do it now. All right, we are here with Burke from Polar,

which is an all-in-one funding and monetization platform for open source and indie developers that's built entirely open source itself. Burke, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Happy to be here, Jared and Adam. Excited to chat about open source and Polar today. As are we.

He said it slightly different than you, Jared. You said Polar. He says Polar. Oh, well. What do you think, Jared? We're on different parts of Earth. You tend to say things slightly differently. I also say Polar, not Polar.

Did I say it weird or who said it weird? It's you, Jared. It's you. I'm calling you out. Okay, I'm the weird one out. I don't mind. I also say polar, not polar. Did I say it weird or who said it weird? It's you, Jared. It's you. I'm calling you out. Okay, I'm the weird one out. I don't mind. I'm different. I'm not even hearing the difference here.

I didn't hear it either. So I'm saying polar. Polar. It's a slight nuance. Listen back. Listen back. Okay. It's a Swedish image.

For those listening at 2X, they'll have no idea what we're talking about because it was just way too fast. Nick is like, what are they talking about? Yeah. Nah. Well, this is cool. First donation to IPO. I'm jumping the gun a bit, but what's the backstory, Jared?

How did we get here to have this conversation? Well, I would love to hear Burke's backstory, of course. The backstory for this conversation was pretty much Mitchell Hashimoto, who we've known for a very long time, announced that he was becoming an advisor to Polar. And anytime I see somebody trying to help open source maintainers and developers make a living doing what they love, I think this is awesome.

So I basically just reached out to Burke and said, let's do a show. And he said, yes. And that's pretty much it. Was there more to it? I think that was pretty much it. Yeah, and I'm really excited to be on. I love the podcast.

So I know you guys have covered a lot on the open source topic before as well. So yeah, excited to just have like an organic conversation about open source and how we can help the ecosystem get more funding and for more people to do it, hopefully full time. So you're a listener of the show too. That's awesome.

Yeah. I can't say I've listened to all the episodes, of course, but I try to stay up to date. You're out of here. Get out of here. Just kidding. So how then, if we're trying to get to how you began with this, why do you care about open source and why do you care about specifically funding open source? Because there's different angles to sustain. And I imagine part of your story is a sustainability factor of open source. Why do you care? Okay, so I think the reason why I care goes back to why I fell in love with computers to begin with.

So a bit of a personal story, but my mom was an entrepreneur when I was a very, very young kid. And she ran a business and we actually lived in San Diego for a few years when I was six to nine years old. Unfortunately, that business ended up going bankrupt. And my mom took it pretty hard and became depressed and had a rough time. So it was a bit hard at home when I was about 10 years old. So I kind of recluded into my own room as much as I possibly could. And Sweden had this great program at the time where they subsidized computers. So

I was fortunate to have a computer in my room. And I was playing this online video game, basically every single second I got. And then one day I accidentally right-clicked view page source. And that's when my future presented itself. looked like gibberish but i understood you know i saw some sentence here or there they're recognized from the site and my first thought was actually that i accidentally kind of hacked this game i've broken it so yeah so i just hit like save this file shut down the computer and expected the cops to just come like racing in any given second right but then i double clicked that file again and I saw a website locally. And then I just started to tinker, right?

And breaking the site and just fell in love with programming very, very early. And I was fortunate my stepdad was a software engineer and he saw this and he came home with some books. But very early on, right? Like I didn't have the notion of open source i don't think we really called it that back then this was like 98 but there were a lot of these forums right where people were sharing code snippets and like these different libraries source forge and all of

these kind of services right and through that that's basically how I become a self-taught developer. I really feel that I owe my entire career and my passion of coding to open source. It's the way that I've learned and become self-taught. It's always been very near and dear to my heart. What about this particular platform you're building now? Was there a trigger moment? Was there a story that's more modern that leads to Polar itself? Yeah, definitely. So quick background on me.

So I started a company called TickTail that was an e-commerce platform that was acquired by Shopify in 2017, 18, sorry. And so 2022, I was tinkering on this project on the side. And long story short, I need to build like an OAuth provider in Python. And this is something that I'd actually done myself like 10 years earlier at Tiktel, the company that I started. There was no open source library at the time, so it took me about two weeks to build my own solution for it. This time, I went to GitHub and I searched again and I found this library called Authlib. And an hour later, I had solved that same problem

that took me two weeks to solve 10 years earlier. And I just, you know, this happens sometimes, right? You stumble upon a library that solves a problem that you've solved yourself sometime in the past and you just recognize the effort and craftsmanship that went into this library. I went through the code. It was much

better than the one that I had implemented. So I fell in love with this library. I was super grateful. And so I raced to get up sponsors to show my gratitude. And I see that this library has thousands of dependents, thousands of commits, but it's getting like $5 a month in sponsorship. And I've always known you know the disconnect between the value given of open source versus the value received from its creators but i guess this time it's just like really rubbed me the wrong way and i just remember like getting upset that they were getting like five dollars and just thinking that how can this still be the status quo and why isn't more being done to kind of just stir the pot and? And why isn't more being done

to kind of just stir the pot and experiment more to see how we can change this and create a pathway where independent open source developers can actually get decent funding? So that was sort of what the trigger moment and the thought of just like,

how would you go about solving this? That threw me down the rabbit hole that I haven't been able to leave since. And that was about a year and a half ago. What caused you to execute? Because being impressed and being inspired and having a feeling is one thing, but then literally doing something,

forming a team and executing is just like, that's kind of part of it, but not really. So what made you actually do it? I think there were two things. So what made you actually do it? I think there were two things. So the project that I started with, the reason why I need to build an OAuth provider in the first place, like that was, so I had quit Shopify and I was thinking about what I want to do next

and I wanted to build something from scratch again. And the idea I had at the time was fairly just like logical. It was just my brain trying to come up with an idea. And so I could always explain it and pitch it, but I always felt that my heart was never truly in it. And then this moment came where I just thought, why can't we fix this problem of open source funding? And it was the opposite.

It made zero sense, but I just felt like in my heart that this was a problem that I just got really riled up about. And so I just immediately started just thinking and exploring, like, how would you go about this? Like, how could you solve this? And, you know, started getting some principles on how i thought that i would go about it and then i started communicating that talking to some open source developers and the more and more i thought about it the more convinced i became that this was

something that i just had to do and was excited to do so there's lots of different ways that people can bring in money around or with their open source work. And we've covered many of them over the years. I think even in one of your blog posts you were talking about Caleb Porzio's sponsorware. I remember talking with Caleb when he first kind of invented the thing and realized it might work for certain things.

And that was very exciting because it's like, okay, here's a new avenue. But there's no great one where it's like, everyone should just do this. It seems like your strategy with Polar is, we're going to provide tooling for all of them. You just pick and choose which one you want to do because you've got newsletters, you've got private stuff,

you've got what looks like SponsorWare perhaps. There's just a lot of different ways that you can execute currently inside polar maybe talk about the current ways people can make money with polar and then we can talk about the strategy that you're employing there to build it out so to start the way you can get money on polar today is we have donations we have classical sponsorships so basically subscription tiers for people who just want to sponsor you without any quid pro quo whatsoever then we have classical sponsorships so basically subscription tiers for people who just want to sponsor you without any quid pro quo whatsoever then we have membership benefits so sort of imagine you know patreon but explicitly for developers in the open source ecosystem so this is subscriptions but where we build native built-in benefits that you can offer and those

benefits are things like invitations to your Discord channel with a premium status, for instance, access to some premium posts and newsletters, where you can provide content and updates or deep dives into your library. And the next phase, which then brings membership benefits into pure sponsorware, is access to private GitHub repositories as well, however many you want to set up. And then the last one is issue funding. So you can very seamlessly just embed the funding badge that we offer on select GitHub issues. So imagine you have a backlog or a roadmap of maybe 10 ideas that you would want to pursue for your projects.

You could badge them with our funding badge and basically invite your community to help out fund those efforts specifically. So those are the ways you can get funding on Polar with today. The next step for us is more like pure commercialization. So I see it like two kind of chapters or two buckets of monetization tools, basically. So one is like patronage, which is all the ones that i talked about and the next phase for us is like commercialization so this is the ability to sell

products whether that's like digital downloads and digital files to ebooks and courses to full-fledged sass as well and like access to private packages or license keys and things of that nature as well so those are the things that we're actively working on right now and hope to launch in the next three, four months or so. That's pretty quick. Yeah. We're a very small team, but we have a very just clear idea on the roadmap and backlog ahead and just ship early

and listen to our customers and iterate quickly as fast as we can. Well, as Jared mentioned, there's many ways to fund and I would say the Goliath potentially in the room is GitHub sponsors and it tends to be the centerpiece when it comes to open source because a large majority of open source happens on GitHub.com. Doesn't mean they own it, but they've definitely captured the heart and ecosystem of open source and we've we've mostly been happily hosting open source there as a community uh we think that

you know microsoft has done a pretty good job of its stewardship of github obviously we're fans of github we got lots of friends inside of github so nothing against them whatsoever but i think the one challenge they've all they've also had with sponsors is how to grow it, how to get it to even bigger. There's great stories from Caleb. What's his last name, Jared? You talked to him. I wasn't on that podcast. Porzio.

Porzio. Porzio. Yeah. Like that story is a breakout hit, obviously, for GitHub sponsors. What's challenging for that is that it doesn't do what you've done, which is provide waypoints in. GitHub Sponsors is like a surface level, and you've got to find out how the value permeates down into the person or projects. Now, we just had a great conversation with the creator of Gleam. Jared, again, help me with the name. Gosh. Louie Pilfold. Louie Pilfold. Sorry, Louie.

You're my best friend. And he is getting great sponsorship on there. Gleam is very popular. He's getting great sponsorship on there gleam is very popular he's getting great support there but what i like about what you just said at least phase one or part one or product one i don't know how you want to how you phrased it is that it kind of gives you waypoints in you let you let the developers or the creators dream about where this project could go and just tag the issue or tag the whatever it might be with here's how we can use your support with donations or waypoints into funding the thing.

That's uniquely different than GitHub Sponsors or even Open Collective. So my principles or my thought process on this is, this is to your point, Jared, like no project is the same as the other, right? Like everyone's unique. And so Caleb has been very successful in coin the term around sponsorware. And those success stories are amazing.

And there's a lot more that could deploy that model. But not all open source projects can deploy that model successfully, right? And so I think with Polar, we're basically giving you the toolkit and trying to optimize and build the best possible experience around all of these different ways so that you as an open source developer or indie developer can sort of cherry pick and pick and choose what makes sense for your initiative,

but also what stage you are in your journey. Because I think that's key. Like most, like if you take HashiCorp or Sentry initiative but also what stage you are in your journey because i think that's key like most like if you take hashicorp or sentry or a lot of these commercial open source projects that have become very very successful i think a lot of them just starts out right as someone scratching their own itch as like this passion project and so you can start at like the far end of the spectrum of just getting that initial donation and a token of what you're doing is awesome.

And I want to see this succeed or I want to help push this forward. And growing from donations to sponsorship to membership benefits, issue funding, sponsorware. And then if you want to go full on, like adding that commercial layer as well. One of your many methods includes something that gave me pause, which is automated sponsorship inside of readmes. Yeah. And I wonder if you know the story of Codesponsor. Are you familiar with that platform?

No. Okay. So Eric Berry began Codesponsor, which was very much that as a feature. And nothing else, Adam, I think. It was specifically that. It was that and some display ads eventually. But the nut that he cracked, which was a brilliant idea for about six months,

was let's put ads inside of your readme because that's where all the eyes are already. And there are people who embed sponsorships inside their readme because that's where all the eyes are already. And there are people who embed sponsorships inside their readme. It's like, you can do that. But GitHub took issue with the way the code sponsor did it and basically shut it down. And I'm curious, I realize that Polar has a suite of tools

and so that's just one thing you're offering and so you're not exactly, you're hedged more than he was with that platform. But that makes me think like, well, what if GitHub decides that Polar isn't cool because it's duplicating some stuff that Sponsors does? Maybe it's doing stuff like read me ad insertions that it doesn't like.

I'm sure you are highly tied into GitHub APIs and everything else. Is that something that concerns you? No, not at all. No, I like it. Okay. I thought I laid out a pretty good concerning case, but tell me why.

You did, you did. I was like... No, you absolutely did. So I didn't know the name, but I know of that story. And so I know that GitHub closed that down because it was essentially pure ads on one side of it, right? Where people would just buy display property on the readme's for... get up close that down because it was essentially pure ads on one side of it right where people

would just buy display property on the read me's for it was pure ad it was developer ads it wasn't like google uh double double click ad click i don't know it wasn't that where like you could just put whatever it was vetted developer tooling a lot lot like Carbon, or what is now Ethical Ads, run by the Read the Docs folks. So it was targeted, but it was ad insertion, dynamic ad insertion into Readme. So yes. Yeah, exactly. And I think to your point, that still happens today,

but I think the nuance, which is a very subtle one, is that you're a sponsor, and so you have your logotype represented as a sponsor, versus you're buying that advertisement placement with the pure intent of reaching a broader audience, even though that might still be the underlying reason why they're sponsoring. And so to your point, we have many different features that we offer, and so would it come to that? We don't stand on that hill alone.

But on the second more important piece, we have very close relationships with the folks at GitHub. There's no competition or animosity there whatsoever. In fact, I would say it's the opposite where both of us want open source to get more money at the end of the day.

And the difference is that it's our singular focus to equip developers to get more money at the end of the day. And the difference, right, is that it's our singular focus to equip developers to get more funding or even commercialize their projects. And so we're an official funding partner. So you can use polar and thefunding.yaml to make sure that it shows up nice on GitHub. And I've talked to them many, many times

and very transparently about our roadmap. And the way we position this readme automation is that it's automating the sponsors and the subscribers for your project versus you buying in for that advertisement, so to speak. That is slightly different, very nuancedly different. Is nuancedly a word? Yeah. Very nuanced to be different. Yeah. Do you think, just because we're on the topic here, I'm going to ask this question, but do you

think it's a possibility, considering that you've got this head nod, let's just say, from GitHub, do you think that because GitHub sponsors has struggled, I mean, it's still doing amazing. I'm not saying it's bad at all, but there has been gross struggles that I'm aware of with GitHub sponsors.

Is it possible that they might want to acquire Polar and just turn you loose? I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible. We haven't discussed it. And I'm in full transparency. I wouldn't entertain that today. I am super bullish and excited about the platform that we're building, and especially this next chapter on just continuing the path and offering commercialization tools for developers as well.

So I think what we're building has legs, and I hope it can be a platform that has significant impact. And I think from GitHub's side, the right strategic approach is to just double down on their app strategy. I think historically, they risk spreading themselves too thin, trying to do too much within one core platform versus just doubling down on what's core and then offering great APIs and great entry points for dedicated companies to go deep on other verticals, which is not their core focus. And I think that's the difference between GitHub Sponsors and Polar,

where GitHub Sponsors is great because it offers donations and sponsorship, which is the most accessible and broadest applicable type for all developers on GitHub. But I think it would be challenging for them to really go deep on products and SaaS and these commercialization tools without spreading themselves too thin or potentially even upsetting their customer base as well.

That's why Polar is a great add-on for those who choose and they can cherry-pick amongst the tools that we offer as well what's up friends i'm here in the breaks with Sama Alam-Naylor from Sentry Senior Developer Advocate. Let's talk about the levels of error monitoring. So let's talk about error monitoring with medium to large-ish teams. And I don't even know how to quantify that necessarily

to say maybe it's a team of five or eight. Maybe that's a medium team. Maybe a largest medium to largest is like 20 plus, 50 plus engineers. You got multiple teams, you got multiple services, you got multiple disciplines within the engineer organization. How does Sentry go from indie dev, solo application developer, or a small team to scaling to support larger to midsize teams? What changes? So it's interesting that you mentioned microservices.

And often these days, when you have larger teams, or you have multiple teams in an organization working on a product, you will have your application split out into little projects, different repos, microservices. And sometimes it can be difficult to know where an error is coming from, for example, if you essentially connect your back and front ends together. If you want to know the details about it, it's through an HTTP header. And that's how Sentry will trace your requests from one service to the next, from the back end to the front end. And so in the Sentry app itself, you can physically trace what happened from where the request originated on the front end, then all the different services that the request passes through to, and then back to the front end, and then be able to identify exactly where the problem happened and exactly what in the front end triggered it or what in the back end triggered it. You can view the source codes and the stack traces all related to it. And then what

you can do is based on where the error came from, you can then automatically assign those issues to particular members of particular teams using things like maybe custom tags or other kind of identifiers on the issue itself. And so it helps you triage, like essentially gives you that separation yet also brings it all together to help you understand the bigger picture, the smaller things about what went wrong in like a fine grained way, and then allows you to configure the app itself to perform particular actions depending on what happened. You know, like a lot of the time, large teams can actually get inundated with a lot of noise. I remember working for a company where we had two teams, a back end and a front end team, but everyone was getting every single error from everywhere. And so what happens eventually is you ignore all of

the errors. Oh, it's failing as expected. It's just noise. It's getting in the way of my day-to-day coding. But if you are more selective about the types of alerts that you send and that you receive as someone who's doing a particular job, you'll be less likely to ignore them, more likely to address the root cause. And then eventually you will have no alerts and no bugs and your application will be perfect. Okay. Get Sentry. Go fix it. Too easy. Check them out at Sentry.io. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io. And make sure you use our code CHANGELOG and you'll get $100 off the team plan, which is super awesome. Again, use the code CHANGELOG, get $100 off the team plan. Sentry dot I-O. So I love the tagline, Adam started with it,

from first donation to IPO. Yeah. Is that real? I love the way it sounds, and it's so grandiose and awesome. But do you expect to ever take somebody from first donation to IPO? Because those are radically different things. Yes. So as I mentioned, I worked at Shopify for three years when our former company, TikTok, was acquired.

Shopify is an insanely inspiring company, and Tobii Lutke in particular. And one of the most inspiring things with Shopify is that they've always internally talked about them being a hundred year company. So they operate on a very long time horizon. And one of the most inspiring stories when I worked there was this company called Allbirds, which was a small company that started out

and then eventually IPO'd and saw that journey by building on Shopify. And so I don't think from first donation to IPO is going to happen this year or next year. I think it's going to give me maybe 15 years, because I think the rule of thumb is like 10 years for a company at least before they can IPO. So within a 15-year time horizon, that's the ambition of Polar. And it goes back again to most of these fantastic companies that are built just start out with someone scratching their own itch, maybe just launching it as a sort of small gimmick on GitHub.

It gets some traction, gets some donations and sponsorship. And now all of a sudden, you have that validation. And so you're excited to continue pushing forward. And we want to be the platform that just continuously breaks ceilings for you so that you can easily just expand with Polar. And that we're the only platform that just builds monetization tools for developers and may get as seamless as possible to go the step beyond just Stripe or other payment platforms out there. I love it. I hope you get there. I hope someday, I guess you probably would IPO before

anybody else would IPO. That would be a massive win, of course. But if somebody else could IPO on Polar and you realize that dream, that would be a very good day. Yes. I would definitely cheer. Me too. I mean, yeah, I think that is definitely the most exciting carrot and ambition

that I can imagine to wake up in the morning and just continue iterating on the product. Well, let's zoom out and then zoom right back in. Because to zoom out would be, where would this apply or how would it apply and to zoom in would be to talk about Mitchell Hashimoto being one of your advisors also launched Vagrant I mean he talked about Vagrant on this podcast legit before HashiCorp was a company like when it was just an open source project yeah like that's how long we go back we go from uh first guest appearance to IPO. It's true. So here you go, Burke.

That's a nice tagline. We've never IPO'd, but other people have after, not because of our show, but after our show. So correlation, causation, you do the math. That's right. That's right. So zoom out, zoom in, but let's apply it. Mitchell obviously is bullish of you all. He's an advisor, but he also created vagrant which

spawned the the company called hashi corp which did ipo was largely built on an open core model open source there was a recent acquisition that's not the point of this piece here necessarily but the fact they did go from a developer with an idea, solving problems, open source, to finding a company, finding product market fit, getting market share, adoption, et cetera, open source, open source, to IPO. How would you apply Polar to something like, or does that even make sense to apply it to a Vagrant-like story to say, to kind of quantify truly the dream of first donation to an IPO. Yes. I think we certainly still have work to do to support that entire journey. Dream with us. Don't imagine what's there now.

Imagine what could be there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So let's imagine, and I'm not speaking for Mitchell Hashimoto here, but to play out this case right, Mitchell builds Vagrant as this side project. He's scratching his own itch and he launches it on github one day and i know the story right like he launched on github like this is what

is it 10 years ago 12 years ago now right more so it was an entirely different ecosystem at the time like there was not the same amount of github stars there was not github sponsorships so i don't think he had that validation at the time but hopefully today right he would have started to be able to receive donations and sponsors and people showing gratitude towards vagrants and for him to explore offering like membership benefits issue funding or even sponsorware for early access to the cutting edge of the vagrant development itself to expand on the patronage model to the point where hopefully like a caleb he could reach a point where you know it's plausible that he himself as an indie could do this full-time but then there's a obviously a

second part to this story right which is that mitchell and his co-founder they decided to like commercialize the project to build a company and to raise venture capital behind that company and i think if you look at all those businesses starting out from open source there are a lot of challenges that they face and like how they can build monetization which the monetization tools themselves like how you can charge for subscriptions or sell products or sell licenses they're all sort of the same mechanics but like operating those and operating in a way that makes sense and still connects to the open source ecosystem and the open source code base that you have requires a lot of infrastructure

and a lot of these companies today are building that like in-house themselves and their venture back so they can do it but that is the next phase for polar right where how can we provide those tools so that mitchell beyond just like now i can work on this full-time myself with my patrons basically how can i commercialize this how can i sell licenses how can i offer subscriptions where polar is the merchant record handles like vat and sales tax internationally and all of that like headache where i'm you know chatting with lawyers and accountants and like dealing with these boring stuffs so that developers hopefully can just focus on what they do best and code the product and just plug and play with Polar

without any ceiling whatsoever. And I think the analogy you can make there is you can still have venture backing. I'm not at all opposed to that in any means whatsoever. But then when you're commercializing, I think you could imagine what we're building with Polar as the next phase is more like, say, Paddle or even Stripe, right?

But how can we take that a step further and just make our APIs and our tooling that much more seamless, efficient, and developer-focused and focused on like open source and indies than those platforms have historically. So that we're the best choice to build out monetization with.

Very good. I've used Paddle a couple of times. I think I have a couple pieces of software, macOS apps, that I purchased via the Paddle platform. There's not a lot of value to me as a consumer, though, in that regard. It's certainly helpful to the developer and the company to

not have to build yet one more thing and manage yet one more thing. But as a consumer of that software, it's been generally like, meh, whatever. It's just a processor. Not just, but like bad. There's no value, truly, to me, aside from knowing my indie Mac devs

can make their apps and keep moving fast and not build things they shouldn't have to. Yeah, I think that's right. Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Stripe, it's mostly value. It's B2B, right? I think the difference is, especially when you're the merchant record, you are managing that end relationship, that invoicing, billing so forth so i do think

there's a layer a good analogy is probably like shopify and shop originally where shopify is the platform right for merchants and then you had shop which we were building which is sort of the consumer layer and it starts with just being that sort of authentication for consumers where they can track all of their orders across the Shopify ecosystem and how that eventually then expands into its own sort of marketplace as well. I think that's a future for Polar but that is much further out. Our future. Yeah. Well I was going to mention it because I can't think of the name of it, but I know, I can't remember the person's name, but before there was Shopify, oh, Store Envy. Does anybody here remember Store Envy? I do.

So Store Envy predated Shopify and really tried to unify that whole thing you just said, which was Shopify and shop. That whole story was played out once before, did not have obviously the success that Shopify has. Otherwise Shopify would not be Shopify. And a good friend of mine mine can't remember his name in the moment because you know old brain and whatnot and that's just how it works but store envy was really cool where it where it had you could be an indie maker similar to like the Etsy way you could be what Shopify is today just be someone who wants to build a store they would give you the storefront they would give you all

the tooling and you all that stuff but they would allow the customer experience to have this unified cart to say, everybody gets, the creators gets this platform, but we unify the creators on the platform with a major storefront that says, if you want to shop shoes, you can go shop all the shoes that are on our platform, et cetera. And then have one unified cart, one unified checkout. And that was a hard nut to crack. I mean, that was, they didn't fully crack it. It didn't eventually, it was successful, but what a capital intensive business you had to like ramp up engineering. This is maybe a slightly ahead of its time in terms of even leadership. But you mentioned store of record at least twice now. And you mentioned, I don't't think so yet but three people in the company

now store of record for a global developer community who wants to build on sustainable funded open source and all the ways you said you could do sounds daunting when it comes to merchant of record can you explain what's required to scale that to do that so so being merchant of record what that basically means, right, is that we're integrating Stripe and Stripe Connect specifically. And so we're the platform account that all transactions go through.

And then our customers or developers using Polar, they can connect Open Collective or their own Stripe accounts that we then transfer that funding to through payouts once it's ready to be paid out essentially right and so legally speaking as well as in terms of money flow customers are buying these products or services through polar and so they're getting the receipts from us like we're in charge of

managing like vat in case the sale happens in Europe from, say, a Swedish customer. And these are things that are like massive headaches for individuals, right? Especially when I talk to a lot of open source developers, people who wanted to explore sort of Caleb Porcio models, like they have been concerned doing that with GitHub sponsorship because they know that if you offer value ads as part of your sponsorship package, technically speaking, you're offering a service which makes you liable and required to capture sales tax or VAT for those transactions, right? And this is not something that GitHub handles. And so

you face some risk there as a developer. And so we take that on, which means we get all of the payments processed through Polar. We capture VAT on a quarterly basis. You know, I work with accountants and do all the reporting and accounting work to make sure that that's filed appropriately and work with lawyers to make sure we're compliant. So yeah, it is a lot of work and I would not want any individual to have to bear that burden. And so that's why we're doing it instead. I think Open Collective did a similar thing when it came to fiscal sponsor. That's a thing in the nonprofit where when you donate, you have to have an entity that can take the donation and deal with a similar thing, essentially, this fiscal sponsor. How long will you bear that burden?

How long will bear that burden? Yeah, like if it's such a pain in the butt, are you excited? I mean, can you, are you excited about that burden? Yes and no. So yes, as... Excited about it. No, but as the CEO and like sort of as a strategy, I'm very excited about it

because I think I've talked to so many open source developers where the risk they face offering services through GitHub sponsorship is too scary for them to try and that they're grateful that we're doing it and that has opened the door for them to actually try these models. And so I am 100% convinced that the world is sort of broken in that way in terms of legislation hasn't followed up with how the internet works right we're just distributing software and selling to everyone globally from day one but now you need to deal with VAT across Europe, GST and Australia. No single individual can ever do that themselves and stay sane on the side of a full-time job. And so from that point, I'm really excited. Then personally, do I enjoy the work of chatting with lawyers and accountants and all that is required to offer this. Not always, but it's an awesome value add to provide as a platform.

And so that's why I'm excited. Have you reached fit yet? Is this worth it? Product market fit? Yeah. Are you still kind of getting there? Yeah, I would say we're getting there. I would say we've reached community fit,

if that's a good word. Like we're getting a lot of excitement and buy-in and developers who I look up to and are amazing that are like on the platform and loving what we do. And I think the challenge, which has always been the case, right, is for us to just build out the suites

and just help more and more of these developers really become successful and be able to work on this full time. There are developers on Polar now that are making more than they did with other offerings in the past, but we still have a long road ahead before we completely pave that path. But I think this next chapter is very, very exciting to open up more doors and more capital to flow in for developers. How do you guys make money? So we take a 5% revenue share

of all the transactions that happen on Polar. That's our cuts and that's how we make money. No monthly fees, no hidden taxes. No monthly fees, no. Stripe is required though, so you're still paying Stripe fees? Yes, so it's 5% plus its payment processing fees. So now we have Stripe, so it's their fees. In the future we'll offer PayPal and others as well.

In full transparency, I am evaluating how we know offer a model where i want to make it completely free so that there's no risk for independent and open source developers to try this out so that's the five percent commission piece but i think if you're going to offer commercialization and for companies to ipo on this one day you need to be flexible here as well. And so taking Shopify as the analogy again, I do see a future where we could offer SaaS tiers, where you can pay a SaaS fee and transaction fees go down along with it as well. Those are things that we're exploring for the future. But key for me is that it's accessible and available without any upfront payment required for people that are just starting out. Well, you could tell you worked at Shopify because it's like not so much a negative to say copy and paste, but it's like, let's look at this model that worked here.

And let's apply this model to another place I care about, which is not the negative copy and paste. But it is a lot of inspiration in terms of you're not there with the SaaS models yet, but they're possibly right around the corner. And the 5% post fees is similar to the way that Shopify makes money and the way that the purchaser, I suppose, in this case, open source developer, can curb that number down or up is to kind of offset it with a monthly fee

or even a yearly fee. Yeah, so Adam, you mentioned Store Envy. Like I'm very familiar with Store Envy. So as I mentioned, I started TickTail Right, which was an e-commerce platform. And we also built a marketplace. So very similar to Store Envy. And we were acquired by shopify to basically lead

like the consumer efforts at shopify which became shop app as we know it today one of the key learnings for me as part of the tiktok journey was we were very young when we started that and we basically tried to innovate everything we touched so everything we try to have a unique approach to or like how do we want to do this whether it's like hiring or perks and benefits for employees to the product as well and one of the learnings for me is just like you just have to be focused especially because we are three people right or just being ruthless about what's the core thing for our mission, which is to allow developers to get paid building their passion. And for all of the rest to just copy what's working in the market.

There's no point for us to innovate in these regards when others have proven a pathway that has been successful in other verticals. Then we can steal, for lack of better words, great ideas from others, so that we can just focus our thought process on the unique things about Polar and how we build these services specifically for this audience, which is open source and indie developers.

So yeah, proudly having worked at Shopify, seeing how they work with a very long time horizon in mind is how I approach it with Polar as well. Like we're not going to do the marketplace thing and being very, very mindful about not trying to do everything in a short timeframe, but rather build something really amazing as a platform first.

Solve that, and then that opens up doors later on in the future. And copy business models that have been proven in similar markets. Have you taken any funding yet? Is this venture backed? Yes. So we did raise a pre-seed about a year ago. Pre-seed, huh? It's like before the seed? Yeah, exactly. I love fundraising these days. It's like there was just an A round or a seed round or angels. Now it's like pre-seed. You didn't raise a pre-pre-seed this time? You decided not to go for the pre-pre-seed?

No, no pre-pre-seed. Maybe next time. Yeah, exactly. Who was in that seed round? Can you share numbers? What can you share about, I suppose, the starting capital to make this possible? So we raised $1.8 million from abstract ventures and mischief ventures as well, along with about a dozen angels as well that has been with us now for a little over a year

since we raised that round. So company of three people we have decent amount of runway left which is a great position to be in and you know we built out a lot of the foundations but the big next step is the commercialization piece which we are excited to like start gradually unveiling in the coming months and expect to have more flushed out within four months, say. So really excited about that and getting that out and then being able to support a lot of different cases. Coming this fall, basically.

I think we're going to launch products, I think, maybe next month already, like hosted downloads, the ability to sell files or programming books or what have you next month as well so a lot of the building blocks will happen gradually and incrementally but i'm really excited like three or four months from now basically what we've done over the past few weeks is taking a step back and just a blank canvas on if you would like commercialize these things like forget about all of the platforms that exist today how can we do that so that you can do it like 10 times faster than any offering out there today and that is just like so much more

enjoyable and designed for this ecosystem and the things that we've come up with and how we're shaping that are super, super exciting that we have internal prototypes for. And I think those pieces, sort of the packaging, is something we'll launch in three months. Can you wet our palette? Yeah, intentionally.

Get a little bit more wet. Give us a little bit of a, for instance, what was an insight that you've had that, not saying you're building exactly this or whatever, but what are some of these insights that would be so much faster, so much better to commercialize software today? So one is just if you look,

I'll share one, which is if you look at all of these different platforms for commercialization or monetization and charging, it's designed very much from their product in mind. So you sign up for the service, you go through this dashboard, you need to learn how the dashboard works. You're setting up these products and eventually you get to the point of like,

okay, how do you actually package this and sell this to your end customers? And we've taken the complete opposite approach of developers first and foremost. We just want to get our hands dirty and write some code and build the product that is our product that we're shipping to our end consumers. And sort of inspired by how we're forking repositories on GitHub, how you can just immediately dive into code and coding your service that you're selling to your customers with all the monetization pieces like readily available to enable directly in your development environments and for like the dashboard and all of that jazz sort of be secondary and something that you don't manage that through rather than like having to set it up and do a lot of housekeeping up front sounds cool yeah it is uh yeah it is i love that response yeah well i think flipping the perspective changes a lot

of things i mean obviously you're just teasing here you're not giving us full details but i do know what a mind shift it was for GitHub to put the source code right on the homepage versus SourceForge, which I had used previously, which was like, where you go to download your software, not to build it and collaborate on it. And so as an open source consumer back then of people's cool projects, I knew that you could click around and find discussion forums and people behind the scenes building the downloads. But all I knew was behind the scenes building the downloads. But all I knew was you go here for the downloads.

And then GitHub, which was very similar in function, took a completely opposite approach. It was like, no, you land on the homepage, you see source code, and read me. And that was just the different angle of the same thing. Completely changed it in my mind. I was like, wait a second, I can actually contribute to this. I can read it, I can understand it.

And so I think, likewise, perhaps, taking a opposite approach that you're describing, although as vague as you're being about it, I can only guess, will hopefully have that profound change and really, I think, spark a lot of productivity and hopefully some monetization as well. Yeah, I think I heard Mitchell, this was not in a conversation Mitchell and I had,

but I heard him chat with someone else about it, but like the story around Terraform and how they were designing the products that they were building in HashiCorp, where Mitchell would basically, on a plane without Wi-Fi, just build like a dummy CLI on what's like a great developer experience and the API that the CLI should have and that's what they define first and then work their way back from there right and very much that's the approach we're taking here

which is just forget about what the product looks like today. Just what's the intent that we're building here for developers to commercialize? How would they want to do that in their own projects? And from there, what do we need to shape our products and APIs to be able to support that? I can't wait to see what you're talking about. It's going to be so exciting. It's the best vaporware of all time. I want to be excited. I want to be excited with you. And I'm trying so hard to be following you, but it's so exciting that's the best vaporware of all time like uh i want to be excited i want

to be excited with you and i'm trying so hard to be following you but it's so unclear that's all right but i'm feeling it i'm feeling you and i'm feeling it now there's some um i'm being vague because there's some very critical pieces for this to work that i would say has not really i haven't seen any other player do it out there in the market today. And so we have some internal prototypes where we have like sold some of these pieces, but we still need to make sure that like all of these pieces can be glued together for something that's compelling as a total package. It's like, it's like middle out. You can't explain that to people. Then everybody else would just start doing a middle out compression algorithm

and try to be in for him and beat you to the marketplace. No thank you. Yeah, exactly. Don't want a Hulu on my back. That's right. Don't want a Hulu on our back. That's for sure. Yeah.

So it might go one layer too deep, but this satiates my personal thoughts because there's developers out there eventually going to be doing something like following their dream like you did. And you pitched, you got $1.8 million. You got two venture backed or venture funds to buy into your idea. Twelve angels. You're telling us this story, but what was it that clicked for them to say, okay, let's fund one more platform out there? And I don't say that negatively because we're asking you questions

to help differentiate you between and what the market's going to do. How do you differ from GitHub sponsors? How do you differ from Open Collective or ethical advertising or ads or whatever it might be? How do you differentiate how you're going to help developers sustain and create funding models? What did you say to them?

What was it that was like, yeah, here's Mills? I mean, the true story is that I said a lot of things, right? But I would say the core thing is the way I saw it was, so I'm Swedish, right? And so one of the companies that we're very proud of here is obviously Spotify, a huge success story right but before then we had pirate bay which also came from sweden right complete opposite that's right and music was in this phase right where everyone thought music was dying like everyone just expected it to be free no one's going to pay anything for it and here came spotify along right and just like there's a new way and that became a success story and they flipped that narrative all the way

around like i think shopify now is like doing more than like the entire music industry was doing back when when they originated and started out right and i think venture capital fundamentally right is taking these moonshot bets that can become something game-changing and define a new market. And I think that's what Polar really had going for it. There's a lot of players out there that are, I think, pitching great ideas, but probably great indie ideas at the end of the day. And for us, it was just you have the developer ecosystem and the open source ecosystem which are immense and incredibly valuable to the entire ecosystem of

technology but we haven't cracked like funding and monetization yet and like i want to build a platform that can crack that code and if you're able to do that i think that can crack that code. And if you're able to do that, I think that can have a really meaningful impact for those individuals as well as for Polar as a business. I think that's fundamentally what excited VCs about Polar and what we're building. And then there was slides about all of the things that we talked about,

like these different monetization tactics that we would offer eventually. But we launched and we just started out with issue funding and so we've been just iterating like one funding tool and now soon one monetization tool at a time to just continuously learn from from users and continuously adapt to hopefully solve it for as many people as possible. If you're anything like me, friends, then you are the kind of person that puts things off until you have to do it.

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now now's the time to cross off your list so go to ladderlife.com slash changelog right now to see if you're instantly approved that's l-a-d-d-e-r life.com slash changelog. So the Polar platform itself is open source. It looks like Apache 2.0 license. Building on top of the GitHub platform, which itself is not open source. And Polar, backed by Mitchell Hashimoto, whose company was open source, in a sense.

As I say, that's simplifying. But recently re-licensed to business source or functional source. I can't remember which one they used. Curious your thoughts on Polar itself being open source. Are you afraid of somebody coming and just copy pasting Polar and renaming it and competing with you? What are your thoughts around that?

So my thoughts around that is we're operating very much in a blue ocean in the sense there's not a lot of competition in our market because there hasn't been a market. That's the one we're trying to create. And so I definitely foresee that once Polar becomes successful, certainly we'll have more competitors and maybe we're competitors with Paddle or Lemon Squeezy in a couple of months as well, right?

But I'm a big believer in if we get the community, like that's the differentiation. Like the code itself is not the secret sauce of Polar. It's like the innovation that we have, what we're building out, the vision for the future. So even if copycats comes along, that wouldn't concern me in the short term. Having said that, you mentioned HashiCorp.

I think there's a lot of cases where they've changed licenses. And I know there's been huge debates about this in the ecosystem. I think it's really healthy and good for our ecosystem that we're starting to have these debates and that we're starting to experiment a lot more. Like in any given industry, like it's not going to be perfect and it's going to be rough and like we're going to be upset and like will happen.

But I think the key thing is that experimentation happens because I think it's been quite stale for a long time where it's just been donations and sponsorship. And I think you have free open source and everyone who's free in all senses of the word, right? And then you have commercial open source. And I think we need to see this as a spectrum and allow for people to operate

within that spectrum without animosity on either side and i think it's really really important that we can experiment to figure out commercial open source and like celebrate when open source developers get paid to do what they do rather than holding them back. I think that's an old concept from the old Microsoft versus Linux days from the 90s that, in my opinion, would just hold us back for the future of open source. Do you think this is a winner-take-most market? Meaning similar to Shopify? There's Amazon and there's Shopify, and is there anything else?

I don't think there's pretty much anything else Shopify is very much the platform for people who are selling online I guess you could say well there's Wix and there's other things that are kind of multi-purpose that also have the e-commerce component but it's kind of Shopify is the winner of that particular game and Amazon's a bigger winner of a bigger game and that's about it

and I think in many ways, GitHub and GitHub sponsors is kind of, well, GitHub is definitely the winner take most of the developer world. Of course, GitLab also doing very well, more on the enterprise side of things, less on the indie side of things. But what about this? I mean, I guess you have Patreon,

you have, I guess Twitch is a different thing. I'm trying to think of creator platforms. You have Patreon then you have the big social media platforms themselves. I don't know. Your thoughts into that place of like, do you think Polar has to get, because if it was and had network effects, that would guard against clones, right? That would guard against copycats

if you had the actual network effects going for you. Yeah, exactly. I think for a lot of those businesses, you have those network effects that eventually leads to like, there's just one winner in the market, right? And I think that Canon is likely to play out here as well in the future. What I also just believe in is, in terms of how we're just shaping products these days,

like historically there's been this you build a generic solution eventually that just works for the broadest possible market as possible and now with the advances in ai like i'm very bullish and believe in like more verticalized software and that's like very very personalized So I think there's a winner-take-all, but I think those markets are going to be a lot more verticalized and specialized in the future than generalized, as they've been in the past. And maybe that's a cop-out answer,

because it's sort of like standing in both camps, but I do believe in the notion of just the pies themselves growing larger rather than fighting over a zero-sum game at the end of the day when it comes to like the creator economy and just helping more people make a living off of their passions. Are there sub-verticals inside software that would niche down even beyond developer?

I'm thinking like InfoSec, researchers. I'm honestly asking. I don't know the answer to this. But is there a point where Polar becomes the generic one and there's also verticals that get carved out from there? Yeah, like game dev, for instance. How do you build? It's actually a question that I'm thinking about, right?

But I could certainly see that if Polar becomes a Shopify for this genre, which is obviously... You would love. I would love. I could certainly see that's another Burke, right? Would be like, well, I want to do this that Polar did, but specifically for like game devs. Yeah, that's a good example.

And here's other ways that... Like, I think there's two types of innovation fundamentally. Either it's a complete technical innovation, which is a game changer, like take advances in AI now. Or it's just about making existing things a lot faster and more seamless. And you had payment service providers

back before, right? And now you have these merchant records like LemonSqueeze and Paddle, which is just, again, a way to make it faster for the end user. And now you have Polar, which is sort of this vertical version of that. And so there might be a vertical of Polar's vertical

in the future as well to just make it even more seamless and even more faster. I saw authorized.net for the first time in like a long time in an email. Oh yeah, I remember authorized.net, yeah. Yeah, that's an old one. I was like, this is back in the day

when you used to have to call your bank. This is pre-stripe, you know? That was 90s, wasn't it? Maybe early 2000s. Oh, it was such a mess. Such a mess. We've come a long way. Yeah.

And it was probably the BSNEs back then, right? Because it had like an XML API. Oh, it was innovation. You didn't have to call your? Because it had like an XML API. It was innovation. You didn't have to call your actual bank. It was certainly XML API. I remember using it. It was. And so maybe even.

But it was enabling insofar as it took you from zero to one. It was a painful progress, but you could actually do e-commerce as you couldn't otherwise. Yeah, exactly. It let it happen. It made it happen. It's just so painful. I was on your homepage. was on uh your home page i guess

maybe your only page aside from maybe sub docs and stuff like that but this section was on uh the headline said serving world-class developers and i couldn't help but notice our friend andres cling serenity os and so as we're in this conversation, I'm sort of digging around. Can we use this project and Andreas as an example of how a success, I mean, it's on your homepage. They're there for a reason. Can you share more of that story, your relationship with Andreas and Serenity OS and how, because I went to SerenityOS and clicked the sponsor button on GitHub and it pops up and says, you know, hey, go over to Polar.

So what you mentioned with being, I forget what you call it, like a funding source with GitHub is obviously true because you said so, but it does work. Yeah. Yeah. Help me understand what I'm seeing here

when I go to polar.sh slash SerenityOS and what their story is. What is it? What are we seeing here? i go to polar.sh slash serenity os and what their story is what is it what are we seeing here what is the story for someone like them yeah absolutely so for those listening that might not know uh just a quick like serenity os uh is this project run by andreas a swedish guy who's building his own operating system since like four years ago five years ago and now also Ladybird, which is his own browser as well. And to be fair, it's a community now, thousands of developers contributing to the project. But it's this absolutely wonderfully ambitious and insane project that

one person took on that just is one of the best examples of where open source shines and what's possible. So that's Andreas and Serenity OS. And so September of last year, I came in contact with Andreas and we had issue funding. That was the only feature we had at Polar at the time. And the next chapter that we were in was what we called rewards, which is how can you take the funding that you're getting for these issues and easily split it with contributors that are helping out solve that specific and easily split it with contributors that are helping out solve that specific feature or whatever it might be and andreas had i think about around the same time just received like three hundred thousand dollars in sponsorship a hundred thousand

from shopify amongst others and so he was in this phase where now he had like a larger pool of capital and like he brought on two engineers full time to work on Serenity with him. But he just started thinking about how can he distribute the funding that he started to get more and more of to more of the contributors that are helping out with Serenity. And so we sort of met at this perfect timing. And so Andreas was actually part, like I shared Figma designs with him on how rewards would work and got his feedback. And we sort of designed that feature together in many ways. And that's how Serenity is primarily using Polar. So they have select issues for Serenity and Ladybird

where contributors can help out and they would get 100% of the funding that the community funds those particular issues. And it's been working really, really well for Serenity and the team. And the reason why they switched so that it points now to Polar from GitHub is because of that as well. Like Andreas loved the idea that with Polar,

he can highlight more developers that are part of the project and help distribute that funding versus centralize that funding to him alone and i can share that idea which is something we're working on now but we're taking that concept of rewards and like really centralizing it throughout everything we're doing at polar so inspired by you know the one percent climate program that stripe launched we're going to introduce like a one percent oss program where the idea is if you're building commercialization and you're like building or wanting to build a hash corp or a century whatever it is that you can automate and recognize like

here's the upstreams and here's my dependencies that i'm dependent on and that automatically that gets distributed to them you can set it at one percent you can set it at 10%, 20, 50, whatever you want. But that's a, I think, very key distinguisher from other platforms as well, where hopefully that will open up the door that commercialization can push even more capital through as part of the model being set up to distribute the income from that to your transient dependencies. That's super cool. I also like your issue splitting feature, which seems similar, to distribute the income from that to your transient dependencies. That's super cool. I also like your issue splitting feature,

which seems similar, where you're actually taking the funding for an issue and you're distributing it amongst participants to multiple people because the maintainer may not be the one doing the work, etc. And so I think that's all really cool. That's the kind of stuff you can build when you are focused on developers versus genericism. Yeah, spot on.

And so we've also integrated that feature quite deeply. So the issue funding embeds very seamlessly on the GitHub issue itself to make that a delightful experience. Rewards works by, we're polling and looking up all the contributions that are referenced to any given issue so that when the issue is closed out we can suggest here's the people

that contributed to this effort for the maintainers very very easily just split it out with them. So do they have to be signed up for Polar and able for that to work or how does it work if a person just happens to contribute to Serendios and Andreas says split this with them but they're not on Polar?

Yeah, so that works. So basically Andreas badges an issue and maybe sets a funding goal for it and himself and others, they contribute funding towards it. Let's say Adam, you chime in and you open up a pull request, you close it out and solve it. So now Andreas sees that Adam closed this and solved it and now andrea sees that like adam closed this and solved it and he can just confirm that it's completed and adam you don't have a polar account by this

stage but andreas rewards you 100 of it and creates a github comment seamlessly through our dashboard that basically just pings you adam and says hey you now have this reward waiting for you on Polar sign up and automatically once you've signed up with your GitHub login we automatically obviously verify the identities and just top up your account with that reward. So it sits in an account can you explain where this money sits at then because you mentioned a lot of money that Andreas got three hundred thousand dollars how did that can you walk me through the flow of money that Andreas got, $300,000. How did that, can you walk me through the flow of money and accounts that sat in and how that money was added to my account or topped up my account? Explain to me where the money sits.

Yes. So just very, very important to make clear. Now I'm not talking about like Andreas $300,000 because that is something he's received. I don't know where that's housed. Okay, that was outside the model. Tell us exactly where the money is, Burke. We want to know where the money is. It's under his pillow.

I'll definitely tell you, but I just want to make clear that I'm not, in this case, speaking about where Andreas keeps his money, so to speak. But so on Polar and the scenario that I painted, right? Let's say, Jared, you're funding an issue $500. As I mentioned, Polar is a merchant record. So that $500 is paid to Polar and arrives into our platform account on Stripe. That's where it sits. And that's a liability on our books, right? And for you as a maintainer and any eventual contributors, like once that

issue is closed out and that money becomes something that you can get and withdraw. We have our own ledger internally where we keep track of who do we owe money from this liability that we have. So the moment when you say, this issue is completed, I want to split the funding, then in our ledger, we basically say, Jared, if you said 50-50 splits, Jared, you're going to get $250. Adam, you're going to

get $250 minus our 5% fees. And that then is showed up in your finance tab on Polar, where you at any given point can just hit withdraw. And that's when we issue a payout or a transfer and payout to your connected Stripe account. So to accept the money from a reward, you mentioned Stripe. Is Stripe the only way currently? Is that the way it is now? So we do have a partnership with Open Collective. So you can point to a fiscal host on Open Collective

instead of a Stripe account. It's like a donation, basically. Yeah, so most of our users are doing Stripe, even though we do offer the Open Collective route. In complete transparency, this is on our GitHub as well, but I definitely foresee and I'm excited about expanding our payout possibilities in the future, like PayPal, direct ACH payouts as well to your bank

to just scale that more internationally and to make it more convenient as well for developers. Yeah, that's awesome. So I went to SerenityOS on Polar, pulled the first, I think they're called Top Issues, just pulled the first one. It's LibWeb. It says add support for Border Radius in GPU Painter.

It goes on to explain who opened the issue, how much has been funded. It's got some avatars there. Kind of explains some things. Mentions that contributors get 100% of the received funds after fees. And then on the right-hand side is the option to go ahead and fund. You've got fund, you've got contribute. I'm not sure what the difference is between those two, but I guess probably contributes code.

That makes sense now that I clicked the button. I didn't reveal what it said. I do understand what it means to be a contributor. Thank you very much. But I can go and fund this. I think when you put in funds, you kind of are contributing, aren't you? Well, that's why I couldn't understand,

what's the difference between funding and contributing? But yeah. Yeah, that's good feedback. Sorry, go ahead. But it gives me the chance to choose my funding amount. It defaults to 20 because the minimum is 20, but I can certainly change that to a couple hundred bucks. What I can't understand so far looking at this UI is if it's been,

I think that means it's been 500 funded there's no request on a certain amount so i could just be throwing money onto the bucket whoever eventually does this just gets this pool of money i don't know what the value is necessarily of it i'm not even sure what my question is but like i'm just looking through what the user experience is i'm like real-time analyzing in a way and to some degree not doing a great job. But it's not a bad UI. But you're giving this on-rent to folks. They understand what the issue is.

They understand how much it's been funded and they can give money or as we just mentioned to be confusing, they can also contribute that is not funding. It's actually code potentially. To give Burke a little bit of credit here, next to the fund button, there's of credit here, next to the fund button there's a heart icon,

and next to the contribute button there's a terminal. There is. They are saying they give you some more affordances to know which one is which. I hear you. I think this is awesome. By no means have we

perfectly solved everything. So I really just enjoy hearing your first impressions here, even though it's somewhat painful. Sorry about that. No, no, not at all. And so, yeah, I think as you mentioned or kind of referred to just quickly there, so if you set up Polar for your project as a maintainer,

you can select or not compete control on like which issues do you want to badge so that people can fund towards it right now you can have it open-ended so that anyone can like fund anything and there's no specific goal or anything like that in mind but you can set a funding goal as well which is very compelling and helps with some conversion as well like we've seen we've seen people set $500 as a funding goal, and then you get maybe $320, say, from three backers. And then someone swoops in and donates $180 specifically, just to sort of like, let's get there.

So that's certainly a helpful tactic, but you don't have to deploy it. And I think this goes back again to, it's just a key principle of ours like this is not issue bounties for open source like i'm very much against them like we've designed issue funding and rewards with maintainers in mind and putting them in a driver's seat and so some maintain, they don't want a funding goal because they don't want to necessarily say that by X amount, like I promised to do it, or they want to leave it open-ended. And so we give them that complete control and flexibility. That makes sense. Let's dig into this UI one more layer, and then I want to get your opinion on why you're so against bug bounties. Let's go so far that you actually fund it. That where i'm going that's where i'm going honestly oh nice nice money i

took it i was at 100 bucks i took it back down to 20 because your explanation just now just scared me so now i'm scared a little bit so it's down to 20 bucks i don't really care about this i want to put some money on it but i'm not whatever i'm just kidding around at ten thousand dollars there's a golden ticket right oh that's a cool feature. The fund this issue button, which is big and blue, doesn't become really the blue it can become until I put my email there, which then sort of unlocks this new UI down below, which lets me choose how to give the money,

not just how much and the button. It gives me the chance to say how much, what is my contact details, and the primary way to do the chance to say how much what is my contact details and the primary way to do that is my email address and then it unlocks card apple pay bank you can even affirm this so if you want a for interest free payment 50 bucks to this thing you can certainly do that it seems cash app pay is an option which i do love cash Cash App. Big fan of Square and Cash App. Klarna, I believe, is also for interest-free payments of $12.50 to fund this.

I lied. I put $50 in, so you're probably doing the math. And then Afterpay, which is another Square slash Cash App ecosystem world, for more interest-free payments of $12.50. So I could, on credit credit fund this thing and go into debt if I wanted to. Let me just go on record and say, don't do that, people. Don't do that. If you can't afford it,

don't fund it. Go buy some groceries or pay your rent. I was going to point that out because that's why I brought that up. I want to go through the funding methods, but I was surprised to see that i can on credit you know fund this thing 50 bucks so let's break all that down i guess yeah let's break it down take that and run with it berg yes i think like ideally a lot of that would just be shown up front so that like i'm a big believer that

just give people the entire form so that they know what to expect and what's required to complete it. There's a unique challenge here, which is, as mentioned, we're integrating with Stripe. We use payment elements as an integration there to create payment intents. And so we need to capture your email to basically create a complete payment intent and process that payment.

Because you're coming in from GitHub and you're unknown to us at this stage, we obviously don't have your email or anything of that nature. So we need to capture that before we can then generate that payment intent and as a result, show the checkout flow, essentially, with the payment details. And I think that's something we can and will optimize even further down the road. But if you paid once on Polar and you have a customer account with Polar as a result of that,

immediately all of that will be filled out. So it will be even smoother in the future as well. You mentioned a lot of different payment options. More than I'd like, actually. But I'm okay with that for the moment. No, no, I think that's good. Yeah, I understand that feedback as well. I think as developers,

we love choice, and we initially launched just with credit cards, like Visa, MasterCard, like the standard, right? Very, very quickly, the feedback we got was like, hey, can you add Klarna? Can you add Cash App? Can you add XY? Yeah, yeah. And so we did. So we've got was like hey can you add clarna can you add cash app can you add x y and z yeah and so

we did so we've expanded to all the requests that people had but i will be honest and say i think the way that's presented could be a bit nicer that's the standard like payment elements from stripe where all of those are shown it's supposed to have some intelligence behind it as well, based on where you're located, to show you the most commonly chosen options. But it can get a little bit busy. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though, when it comes to payment options. A lot of customers see this as a good thing, and it helps with conversion we've certainly seen you know people do use cash app and all the like not so much the clarinus of the world which to your point jared is is good so we don't hope people i concur with jared too i think i was i was surprised which is why i walked through it i really wanted to walk through it to explain that part but not so much to say this is bad necessarily but like it was unexpected to be to have an option to pay this generosity i want to give to the world via credit you know via interest repayments to a behemoth like a firm

which is just basically everywhere i don't disagree with the options i i do disagree with just one more way to go in debt gosh you know i mean because i mean honestly there's some people out there that would have like deep heartstrings because of whatever reason and give more than they might be able to if it's an option now that's their choice you can't change what their choice is right as an individual and a human but at the same time i do think think that there's a line that you can draw there morally to be like, ah, you know, maybe this doesn't really make sense for our purpose.

And you can sort of dice that tomato if you like. But I do like choice. I do like Apple Pay. When I'm, you know, since you're from the land of Shopify, I'm a big fan of Shopify's checkout process. You know, I almost elevate my trust for the merchant or the place I'm buying it from if they've made a good choice, which I believe Shopify is a pretty good choice. And if they especially enable payment types like Apple Pay,

which I'm not a fanboy, but I'm a user. And so if I can pay with Apple Pay, I prefer it online just because it's just so simple. finger does the does the pushing on this biometric key they gave me and i'm going to use it okay it's it's just too easy so i would i would definitely lean on that side as you explore this uh this ui more yeah i hear you and i think the way i want to approach it is um to give maintainers the option and more control again like true which options do they want to show up in the context of their real estate which is how I see this but I wouldn't go so far as to say like we're actively going to take the decision of like not allowing the Klarna's or the affirms of the world yeah like Klarna's a Swedish company I know I don't

know what the experience is in the US but in sweden there's certainly that criticism against clarna as well right there's people that should not be spending with clarna and getting in depth with it and that's as jerry said like do not do that never right he was pretty he was pretty stuck with his response he's like straight on it don't do it no don't not like never never ever ever ever ever that's just my advice

but I understand that you give it as an option you know yeah exactly because in like for me in Sweden

like I always buy with Klarna if I can just to support the company no no I don't understand not at all

okay it's just for the convenience I think it's beyond the interest-free payments though right

it's a platform for like shopping, right? It's similar to the way you might use Apple Pay, right? You put your payments there and you leverage them. It's different. I just know they have like a whole different, beyond the interest-free payments. Yeah, so for me in Sweden, it's at least that like when I buy stuff online,

this could be like grocery shopping to clothes, whatever it is, right? It's that I can pay and manage payments through Klarna centrally. And then I have all my receipts and everything that I need through Klarna. I much rather prefer that versus like my credit card, which is then just like kind of anonymized transactions on my bank. And I need to go to my email to dig out these receipts. It's just not as convenient as Klarna is for me in Sweden.

But to be clear, again, I would never use Klarna to pay off something that I wouldn't be able to afford. So buy now, pay later is just one of the things it offers. It's not the entire deal. Right. Like even there's a learn more spot there, which comes with a modal and it says there's four payments of $12.50 I only know a firm to be their only option to me that I'm aware of is just simply legit credit. It's a version of it. It's buy now, pay later. It's for interest-free payments of $1,250, but I've created a debt that I've got to pay over multiple months.

I may miss. There may be fees. There may be goons coming to get my kneecaps or whatever who the heck knows how deep a firm goes I know they're everywhere

but it's just not sure hey here's the cash I have I'm being generous I want to fund this libweb ad support for border radius and gpu

painter issue there you go it's a little bit more hairy and I we're camping out here I think a little slightly too long but I

maybe a little bit too long a little too long now just to go a little bit more hairy and i we're camping out here i think a little slightly too long but i maybe a little bit too long too long now just to go a little bit longer just what if this particular feature you know enables your business to finally turn a profit and you need it to be done but you don't have any cash right now and if this feature lands then you're about to take off like a rocket ship and all you if you just, pay later, your life might be saved from utter destruction. 12.50 later per month. No, I think I guess the TLDR from my

stance is like I think give the maintainers the control so that they can offer all the things that we can offer through Stripe so they have the complete flexibility. I think it's always a bit dangerous when you like make these decisions on behalf of all of your customers because i agree you can use these services and they are used in ways that are not beneficial or great whatsoever that's true

but like like clarna it's a great service that a lot of our Swedes, at least, are using to pay for stuff immediately. Just do so in a convenient way. And so this is where it gets super tricky for me. I think it's like, give maintainers the tools to make the decisions they're comfortable with. But I'm not comfortable saying, I will block these payment methods because of my own political opinions.

Well, it's not politics, but it's a personal opinion. It's not politics. Yeah, that's, yeah. I mean, I guess it's personal politics. Sure, blur the lines a bit. But so here's maybe a vote for, and just me playing the advocate for this. We're not moving on.

Okay. Is what if I'm willing to take on that as a responsible human, this four-month payment, and I don't have the cash, but I want to fund this thing because I'm in the community. I'm talking to these people in Slack or in Discord or some other real-time channel. And this is just simply the interface I go through to enable. I guess that's okay. That's up to that human to make their own decision. I may have an allergy and Jeremy as well to leveraging credit or a debt in this way.

And that may be my choice. That's not everybody else's choice. I do think there is some danger in there. But if you're doing it responsibly, then if it's the maintainer's choice too, then so be it. So be it. And if it makes you more comfortable, Adam, we have yet to have that case where someone actually leverages something. Let's not have any horror stories about somebody overfunding open source and having major troubles let's move on to your issue with bug bounties how how deep does this go is are you you're gonna

pound your fists you can get red in the face I can yeah I can for sure okay do what you gotta do tell me okay okay so there are two core issues with bounties in open source, at least how they've been historically executed. So one thing is just like bounties as a concept is great, but bounties only really work when there's like two parties involved. There's the person setting up the bounty, who's also the person in charge of like the quality assurance of the deliverable. And obviously the person that delivers the goods that the bounty set up for so like a classical example is

the western movies right you set up a bounty like capture this bad guy ten thousand dollars that's the u.s government that says like we'll verify that you did the right thing and then pay out ten thousand dollars in open source the way bounty has always worked is that someone just puts up money for any issue without the maintainer's involvement awareness or approval typically on a marketplace where others can then like work on those issues for that bounty right and this always leads to the same thing where you see these get up issues where this maintainer the poor maintainer who is already suffering from not having enough time and just getting you know constant streams of issues coming in now he has like a lot of different contributors coming in that are just there for

the incentive of getting the money and if you look at those issues it's always the same case where it's like it's a race towards that cash and so the contributions are of like fairly low quality in comparison to like someone being there for the right incentives and it's a competition and a race amongst the contributors i think that's the second problem which is it's often a marketplace approach where it's these directories where you can sort of sort issues by the amount that you can get which again just like as soon as someone then funds it a thousand dollars you're going to have like five to ten developers swooping in there to try to get to this price and i don't think that that is what open source maintainers need,

and historically what we've seen is just that they hate this and they turn it off. And so we took a very drastically different approach, which is just let's put the maintainers in the driving seat here and let's rather make it about how can we fund their efforts with the backlog and all of the issues that we're pouring onto them and then give them the tools to then distribute that funding with their existing community of contributors rather than

setting a marketplace that attracts people just for the sake of that money it's kind of like uh i don't know how it is in sweden but it's it's kind of like garage sales right there's a certain type of person and i go to garage sales i'm not saying like socio-e a certain type of person, and I go to garage sales, so I'm not saying like socioeconomically type of person, but just generally, it brings people into a neighborhood that don't otherwise belong there, and sometimes they're not there with the best incentives. Sometimes they're there to get a deal. Sometimes they're there to like look at the neighborhood, because now they're able to be there in a way that gives them less side eye, less shade, I don't know, whatever it might be.

And we've had some bad things happen in different neighborhoods over time with garage sales. It's like, it's an invitation to people who generally don't belong there because they don't live there. They're not of the community. They're not there contributing and giving and supporting and all the things. They're there simply to sort of take away or be there in a sneaky way and do something that's not, that's nefarious. It's not cool. Yeah.

It's kind of like that. It kind of reminds me of that. I mean, this is something that I very strongly believe in. I've chatted with hundreds of maintainers in building Polar and designing what it should be. And so far, it seems that this has resonated a lot. Like we get a lot of credit for going that different route. And that's why there's a lot of developers that are using issue funding that wouldn't

and have opted out of other like bounty programs in the past. Even though, you know, there might be like, it would probably be like a quick buck to do it, right? Like maybe, but I just fundamentally believe in like building for that developer and the maintainers for the long term rather than doing some short-term optimization. Gotcha. Let's give a prescription to some folks. We got lots of types of folks who listen to this from people who contribute, people who want to fund, open source maintainers, folks who are

looking at this thinking, oh my gosh, I'm so glad this conversation happened. They went that deep into that UI. Holy moly. Thank you so much. Made it past the find out, pay later part. Right. Give some direction to the folks who want to look at the platform you're building as a creator or a maintainer or whatever terminology you leverage to define that person, what's a good first step for maybe three different people? The creator maintainer who wants to support their project and do what SerenityOS has done and Andreas has done to somebody who wants to look for the projects that might be on there because they like the way they can be a part of

the community and give. And maybe the other one, I don't know who it might be on there because they like the way they can be a part of the community and give. And maybe the other one, I don't know who it might be. So two maybe, or three if you can. Give me some direction. So for all of the maintainers out there, I think the key thing is, I've spoken to hundreds of different companies as well of how we can get more companies

to invest in open source. I'm very bullish and we can get into that as well, but I believe that the route to open source sustainability for individual maintainers is to look at all of the things that they're doing beyond the free code that they're giving that is value adds that they're already giving today, such as support, issues that they're crushing, to discourse that they're creating and managing. And that's where I think you can take like a step back and think about how can you package this in an offering where you can actually get people to like sponsor you to get these additional benefits

to also benefit you as well. So I would start small, like sign up to Polar, like start using issue funding. If that floats your boat start using donations and sponsorship but i would encourage you to like start offering some membership benefits and we've designed them to make them really compelling without breaking the principles of open source in the sense that like you can have paid memberships where you can offer premium posts like premium content and insights to what you're building and your projects and progress, what have you. We can also set it up to be early access

so that automatically those newsletters become publicly available after, say, a week. And so if you're offering a Discord today and you're writing some updates, set that up as a tier where you're giving early access to those updates. Create some roles on like set that up as a tier where you're giving early access to those updates. Like create some roles on discords where there might be a channel

where those people that are sponsoring you, they can, you know, you can chat with them and maybe hear, pick their brains earlier and so forth. Just give those types of benefits because the truth is like the paradox of open source is that it's immensely valuable, but like the value is also in in commoditizing the value. And it's really, really hard to get money from something that has been offered for free.

But recognize that you're giving a lot more on top. And experiment with Polar, how you can capture that into more funding with our tools, while still being in the best interest of your community without completely going proprietary, of course. Striking that balance. The other audience, who was that? That was people who wanted to contribute and more on the market side. They want to support open source.

And they see this as an example like, hey, I can't go easily and just look at all the options for GitHub Sponsor, for example. There's no index of, GitHub is the index, right? Same with Polar. I can't go to an index either and say, okay, who's on Polar? Who's on First kind of thing? I don't know.

I can't figure it out. But I want to give some money or I want to support open source or maybe even that contributor might be an OSS fund or something like that, where they're wanting to divvy out some things. Give them some examples of those people that are not creators and maintainers that need support, but those who want to give support.

So that was one of those things that when we started out with Polar, I put an equal emphasis on that side of things. So the holy grail, when I chat with a bunch of open source maintainers is how do we get businesses to fund our efforts? And so I spend a lot of time

like how can we build tooling for businesses and individuals to see their dependencies and fund across it. And don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot that can be done there in the future, but that is where we've made a deliberate choice of like, let's stay focused on building that platform first and foremost, of just equipping the developers with all the tools to improve the funding and monetization for their own efforts.

Because they can already reach their audience through GitHub and these other networks where we can expose that tooling. Because if we would get stuck sort of in discovery, I think the drawback of that would be that we wouldn't offer as compelling and value-add services that you can upsell. And that would put a cap on what the potential could be for you as a developer. So this is where I think the partnership with GitHub and just recognizing that everyone is on GitHub, how can we surface those value adds that we help developers easily offer through there rather than trying to compete and build our own network today.

What's left, Jared? Just take over the world. I think that's the only thing left to do. That's it. IPO, baby. IPO. I love it. I'm very excited. Just take over the world I think that's the only thing left to do That's it IPO baby IPO I love it I'm very excited I've been trying to get

Every time we talk about GitHub sponsors With folks from GitHub sponsors I say what about issue funding And they always say For whatever reason They're not doing issue funding And so I'm just excited That you've tackled that particular aspect

And that there It seems like as other ways to fund come out and are invented and proven, Polar just adds that to the suite of options. I think that's just going to be great for so many people. I'm excited. I'm wishing you the best. I hope that you become the Shopify of open source developer monetization tooling. Me too.

Word salad there. I like that. Sad about the future. This was a fantastic, fantastic conversation. And Adam, really appreciated the UX roast. Kind of any time. Like, yeah, I don't expect a deep dive. Yeah, yeah.

Jokes aside, I genuinely appreciate it. It's nice to hear people's first impressions. There were a few things in there that I'll take back to the woodshed and polish up the product further. Gotcha. It came from a good heart. I want to see the best for you. We obviously have been in the trenches with developers for so long,

and we love them. Obviously, we are them. Anything like you're doing, the way you begin with your mom and your initial story to loving open source and now executing to support ways for open source developers to maintain and sustain, I mean, I just want the best for you.

So, obviously, I'm going to go deep and share what I do and don't like. And I liked a lot of it. I liked a lot of it. I can see you iterating. We're fans of iteration too. We're software developers. Our first show sucked, okay? I mean, it was a good content,

but the show sucked. And look at us now. Still just slightly better. I was going to say. Just slightly better. Still completely subject to rabbit holes that last for hours. And always mentioning Silicon Valley.

All right, Burke. Well, thank you so much. Good on you. Polar.sh, everybody. Check it out. Yeah, of course. Thank you, guys. That's it.

Bye, y'all. Thanks, Burke. Thanks, guys. plus plus people stick around for a 10 minute post show with even more talk of buy now pay later options i don't know maybe that's more of a minus minus give it a listen and decide for yourself then let us know what you think in the comments or in our community slack which, by the way, is one of the internet's remaining oases of awesomeness

and at zero bucks the price is right too get in on it and come say hi at changelog.com slash community thanks once again to our partners at fly.io, to our beat freak,

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Well, that's all from me, but we'll talk to you again on Changelog friends, on Friday. Thank you. I was joking about how deep that we had gone on, and I made that stupid joke about, I can't remember what it was, but it was basically like, let's stop talking about this. And then Adam's like, and then he went a whole other step deeper. And I was like, are you seriously still going? I thought it was you that went a layer deeper.

That's good. Well, mine was a joke, though. I was like, what if somebody, yeah, that's when I give the hypothetical of a person who just needed to buy now, pay later, just to make their business take off. Oh, yeah, I did. And I had to advocate for it. I thought that was going to be the last word. I was like, let's move on. I thought about it in a way that it's actually useful.

And I was like, well, you know, maybe this is very convincing to you. You're like, you know what? Maybe somebody could. I mean, like... It's better!