Why did BackYourStack not take off (and why should we bring it back)?

[BenJam]

I'm keen to understand why BackYourStack https://backyourstack.com/ did not take off.... because I would like to kick it back into life.

At the risk of airing everyone's dirty laundry in public: I would love to hear from you why you think BackYourStack did not see the kind of traction that we might have expected. I imagine it's a combination of factors but for it could be:

Limited scope to support projects
BackYourStack only allows users to contribute to projects that are on Open Collective, and Open Collective only has around ~3,000 open source projects. There was support to pledge to a hand-picked set of impactful projects also, but again capacity was limited there.

A complicated user experience
BackYourStack allows you to contribute to projects that matched with the dependencies it found, but it did so in a step by step fashion. There was support for a subscription service, which was managed through a contribution to Open Source Collective but the flow was confusing and unclear.

Insufficient investment in marketing
BackYourStack was a small experiment for Open Collective, when small experiments don't gain traction immediately it's easy to write them off. It may be that, especially at the time, the investment required to get a project like onto the radar of the organizations that would love to use it required a more considered, long term effort.

Security concerns
Supporting your dependencies means sharing them. Some organizations may not wish to give third party access to their dependency manifests, at least not without some protection or considerable ROI.

Limited Technical Capabilities
BackYourStack is only able to parse dependency manifests from JavaScript (NPM), PHP (Composer), .NET (Nuget), Go (dep), Ruby (Gem) and Python (Requirement). While these are popular languages and frameworks there are many more package managers out there.

@piamancini @znarf @Betree @alanna @kewitz @awright I'm keen to hear your thought and to get your take on what you think it would take to make it a success. The world has change a lot since BackYourStack was launched and I know there was an effort to rebrand the site, but do we think that marketing was the biggest limiting factor? For me the crux is the first two...

[alanna]

I feel like marketing is a big part of it. Not that it would be guaranteed to succeed if it were better marketed, but we don't even really know if it would be valuable to people until they have the chance to find out about it. The trick is how do you test if a project has legs without overinvesting in marketing before you have any data showing it's worthwhile. But considering the huge investment that was already made on the tech side of the product, it seems like a missed opportunity to not get it out there more.

But marketing for BackYourStack, on the financial decision-maker side, is a very different proposition to making maintainers aware of it. Using BYS as part of an enterprise-level sales pitch for major investment in open source is something that would happen in a very different kind of marketing pipeline. Given the challenges Github has had getting Sponsors for Organizations off the ground, we know this is a hard problem.

So maybe the right question is, who would BYS marketing that we can reasonable achieve be for? Perhaps aiming for the developers within large tech companies and equipping them to go up the chain internally to the financial decision-makers, with BYS as a tool to help them build their case?

I also felt like the Jabbar discussion was relevant, i.e. how can open source projects figure out what companies are using their code? If we equipped maintainers with more intelligence on that front, it would align incentives and enable maintainers to approach key user companies with BackYourStack as a tool to demonstrate the dependencies. If what we're trying to do is equip maintainers with tools to make the case to companies to financially support them, knowing who to make that case to is pretty key.

Is there a strategic opportunity in connecting BYS and Funds? Could a Fund be set up through the high-touch enterprise sales relationship building that has been the pathway of all the large funds we have set up so far, and then use BYS as a way to decide how to distribute the money? So companies could make the decision to fund open source generally and put $$$ in the Fund, then experience a sort of concierge service where BYS enables distributing the money without lots of time and complex decision-making on their side. This could bridge the kind of sales/marketing required for large sponsorship deals with the function of BYS.

[RCheesley]

I wasn't aware of the original campaign, or if I was it didn't register enough for me to engage with it.

I think one reason I found the site a little frustrating was it didn't have support for GitHub Sponsors and other funding options (e.g. Tidelift, Patreon, PayPal). That excluded some projects making it seem like they weren't looking for funding, and also for example Symfony came up with the Diversity initiative (on Open Collective) rather than Symfony the project itself, which was a bit confusing.

I had to manually search for their funding sources using composer fund and/or using the detected dependencies table, and cross-reference with what I'd found.

From the user perspective what might be a nice flow is:

• Run a check against your repo
• Identify all the projects which are seeking funding - allow you to export this e.g. into a sheet and/or a PDF report (maybe merge with outcome from composer fund?) This is useful if you're presenting a case to your company / to a committee / in a report etc. I had to manually copy/paste which was a bit of a pain! 😉
• Provide a way to follow up (e.g. send me an email with all the projects and links to support them) for folks who might want to do it offline / independently / at a later date / send to their boss
• Acknowledge there are a bunch of other ways to fund the projects if they are not listed
• Allow the user to specify an amount (e.g. one-off or recurring) and select any projects you want to support
• Have the contributions set up automagically (via Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors or whatever - log in with the relevant accounts / authenticate to enable it to be set up, if that's possible?) - offer the option to decide which to use where multiple options exist.

It would be amazing if, as an org or an individual, I could have one place where I could centrally manage my monthly / annual donations and not have to go out and process that through each individual project. Makes it easier for larger orgs who have xxxx$ per year to disburse to see where they're at, who they're supporting, etc and simplifies the process massively. Makes it possible for smaller orgs to spread limited funds as they want to without the big overhead of separate transactions in separate places, and encourage them that they can make a difference.

[DuaneOBrien]

My opinionated $.02, with nothing but love for y'all.

I haven't had visibility to the behind-the-scenes work that went into it, but my outside-in perspective is that Back Your Stack (BYS) was built on the foundation of a good idea, but not sufficiently tested as a product with maintainers, projects, or companies. I don't have the sense that anyone was serving as product owner for BYS, which points to more a more fundamental problem - that BYS was built on untested assumptions.

Re-energizing the project could be a good idea, but if you're serious about doing it I would focus less on "what could it do" and more on validating/invalidating the assumptions that must be true for something like Back Your Stack to succeed. And if you're not able to make BYS someone's primary responsibility, it will be unlikely to go anywhere with or without a reboot.

[abitrolly]

I'm keen to understand why BackYourStack https://backyourstack.com/ did not take off....

Huh? Is there any public data about that? Looks like it is fine being online.

Assuming that there is a problem.. Looking at https://backyourstack.com/ I see the misalignment between the name and the goal. While the name urges to back your stack, the description says to just discover. So it is just a one time curiosity tool to me.

Then to really back one's stack, one needs to have a S.M.A.R.T target for it.

• Specific - financial support for Open Source projects ✔️
• Measurable - how many projects ✔️, how much do they need (❌), how much can I give (❌), how much is sufficient (❌)
• Attainable/Actionable - know who to support ✔️, how to exactly do this (❌)
• Relevant/Realistic - do my org care about it (:x:)
• Trackable/Timed - what is my progress and the goal (:x:), when my stack will be backed (:x:)