“You get tons of developers actually contributing to your product. I can't say it's making you more productive when people contribute — but it gives you tons of feedback and lets you find bugs much faster, iterate.”

Contributors are the real retention flywheel — they find bugs paying users would churn over

Open-source contributors aren't valuable because they ship features faster — they're valuable because they surface bugs and feature gaps that paying users would otherwise churn over. They also become advocates inside their own companies, doing word-of-mouth selling to the non-developer buyers.