How did I get here, how could you get here, and would you even want to?

on YouTube ↗20m

" summary

North Road grows from 2013 hobby contributions into a business split roughly 20% spatial services, 80% software services using QGIS, GDAL, Inkscape and Qt/PyQt; revenue comes from training, enterprise support, plugins and direct contracts, plus grants (OSGeo, Cesium), crowdfunding and a mixed‑license product called Slayer; the first paid contract was $200 (comparable jobs now run €20–30k); unpaid contributions act as marketing and risk management, and outsourcing to project experts speeds delivery.

AI-written summary · about

" chapters (12)

1. 0:00Introduction and background
2. 1:23Northroad Consulting overview
3. 3:58Open source as product vs tool
4. 5:45Making money from open source
5. 7:12Personal journey to Northroad
6. 11:06Northroad’s organic growth
7. 12:10Viability of open source contracting
8. 13:14Open source as a business tool
9. 13:59Developing new open source products
10. 14:19Three practical tips from Northroad
11. 16:48Unpaid contributions necessity
12. 17:34Q&A and closing remarks

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