Exactly, before you go to open source, take a hard look at

* why I am doing that

* plethora of burned-out maintainers and their posts

* how I am going to deal with the issues/PRs, toxic entitlement

* what's my exit strategy

The first thing before you go into open source (provided it's actually used open source) is to answer these questions honestly for yourself. Because it's massive time sink with no money and *there will never be money* (unless you go open core or your employer pays you, in that case that's just a job just like any other).

One important thing the author got from working on open source is free feedback (issues).

I don't view people taking the time to open issues as entitled people, but people offering their free time providing invaluable feedback.

Those issues are quite often different from what I expect, and they represent of how people are using the software.

The only mistake the author did was waiting too much monetizing, not doing open source software in the first place.

TBH, I get way better feedback from paying users than previously from free users. Free users like to tinker and think in terms of "what if," so they bring up all kinds of features the software should also have because it can or it would be cool. The paying users only need actual features that help their business case, and they do not care at all about these "what if" features.

I see, do you think just _starting_ with payed product would have been better? (Or starting with a product + open source tools for marketing?)

BTW good luck to scaling up to $60k / month, it will be fun

I did not plan to make the project paid at first, I would have prefered the OS / Open Core model, but it did not work out. So what I meant about the feedback was that the feedback for a free product might not help much for a paid product and vice versa. Different target groups, different priorities. On the other hand, more users, no matter if free or paid, help to detect edge case bugs better as there is a higher chance of someone stumbling on it and reporting it. In this case the first larger wave of free users did help me, yes.

Plenty of projects are source-available, but not open source, and get tons of issues, and even contributions (https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension off the top of my head)