Elie here from draftfantasy.com!
Our draft World Cup game is launching soon: worldcup.draftfantasy.com
Fully free to play.
We offer both snake and auction drafts with lots of customisations available.
You can do mock drafts against humans or AI to get a feel for the game.
You can register today, but league registration will only be coming in a week or two from now.
We made our AI email assistant open source. This was 3 years ago. When you still had to convince people open source was a good idea and could make money.
At first, people thought the benefit was distribution.
More GitHub stars. More technical users. More people discovering the product.
That happened to some extent, but it wasn’t the main benefit.
The real benefit was trust.
When you’re asking for inbox access, people have reasonable questions:
What are you doing with my emails?
Can I inspect the code?
Can I self-host?
Is this just another black box connected to my Gmail?
What happens if the company disappears?
Open source gave us a better answer than another polished security page.
It didn’t remove every concern, but it changed the conversation.
Instead of “trust us,” it became “you can look.”
That matters a lot in categories where the data is sensitive.
The downside is that open source also forces discipline. You can’t hide messy assumptions forever. People see the product, the code, the issues, the tradeoffs.
But for this kind of product, I think that’s a feature.
My lesson: open source is not automatically a growth strategy. But for a product that touches private workflows, it can be a trust strategy.
And sometimes trust is the actual distribution problem.
Where do you find the most pain with email?
How much of your business runs over email vs Slack or other tools?
I care about this because I'm the founder of Inbox Zero: https://getinboxzero.com
Offering monthly AI credits for life just doesn't work.
The cost is too high.
How do founders launching on AppSumo make this work?