Dmitry Grankin, founder of AI assistant startup Vexa, published a blog post in which he provides some insight into his decision to open source the company’s flagship product.

Grankin offers many pearls of wisdom in sharing his experience, but his thoughts on the product development benefits of open source are particularly salient:

In the traditional product development cycle, founders often struggle with the “talk to user – make MVP” approach because standard user feedback is limited in quality and often binary (using/not using). Most users lack the technical understanding to articulate what they want beyond surface-level features.

Open source changes this equation dramatically. Your open source users aren’t just passive consumers—they’re stakeholders – engineers, developers, and technical professionals who:

• Understand your codebase at a fundamental level
• Bring diverse industry perspectives that your core team lacks
• Contribute actual issues and code solutions rather than vague feature requests
• Test hypotheses in their own environments and report concrete results

This transforms product development from a black box of guesswork into a transparent, community-driven process where the most valuable improvements rise to the top naturally. Instead of the traditional approach where you might spend months building features nobody wants, open source users provide immediate, actionable feedback on what’s truly valuable.