This article was originally published on the Chatwoot Blog{:target=“_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”} and is republished here with permission.

Chatwoot is now one of the most popular open-source live chat software on GitHub. If you haven’t been following the story so far, here is the story, in a nutshell, to get you started.

Chatwoot started as a commercial project in 2016 and strived to help businesses provide exceptional customer support through Facebook Messenger. The product inspiration came through the customer pain points which we observed while working in this space as a part of our previous gigs. Nevertheless, the project didn’t culminate into a viable business, and we shut shop in 2017.

With the amount of sweat we put into the project, Chatwoot still stayed alive in our hearts. In 2019, as an impromptu decision, we ended up open-sourcing the project as a part of the #hacktoberfest. The story took a different twist then, and Chatwoot went on to be a top post on Hacker News. Ever since then, the project has been growing at an incredible pace with almost 5k stars on GitHub currently.

Today marks a year since the initial commit for Chatwoot’s resurrection as an open-source project, and so let’s take a step back to look at Chatwoot’s journey in the last year.

The Decision to Go Open-Source

How do you start a popular open-source project?

Over the last year, we might have told our story countless times. However, often, the larger story fails to capture the minute moments and the thought processes behind deciding to go open-source. Many a time, we have felt that the Chatwoot story as an answer to the question “How did you decide to go open-source?” leaves the questioner unsatisfied. That said, in all honesty, there was never a grand scheme behind the decision.

In the second quarter of 2019, the core Chatwoot team was back together prototyping yet another SaaS product. It was in one of our regular sync-up calls that @pranavrajs floated the idea of making Chatwoot open-source. The idea didn’t attract any criticism, but there wasn’t too much enthusiasm in the air either, thanks to our Imposter Syndrome.

Our experience in open-source till that point was limited to being consumers. Being ardent fans of the code quality in open-source projects like Vue.js and Ruby on Rails, we had our insecurities exposing the project to the whole world.

With zilch expectations, we went through it like just another day in our lives and decided to commit the codebase to GitHub. We would leave it there while the team continued working on our next big thing, we had thought! ;)

Ignition: Ready Set Go

In August 2019, as unprepared as we were, Chatwoot codebase was brought out as a public repo. Our expectation of an uneventful day quickly turned around, thanks to the spammers who got hold of an SES key from an old commit. The incident ended in raking up quite a surprise in the form of AWS billing alerts. We did act swiftly to mitigate the issue, but as far as the business plan behind open source goes, this is the story.

October saw the repo getting some attention thanks to #hacktoberfest, which re-kindled the whole team’s interest in Chatwoot. It even resulted in the team deciding to put on hold the then ongoing project and give Chatwoot our full attention for the next 2 months. We did the much-needed maintenance chores over the repo and ended up shipping the website live chat feature that we lacked. The absence of other communication channels, especially website live chat, was one of our prime hypotheses behind the earlier failure of Chatwoot. Having been able to ship that feature in 2 weeks, amidst the newfound enthusiasm, is something the team is still extremely proud of.

The ultimate unexpected kickstart, however, came in December in the form of Hacker News, which we attribute as the start of Chatwoot as a serious open-source business.

After Hacktoberfest, we saw the attention on our GitHub repo reducing despite the team shipping new updates. In all helplessness, @pranavrajs gave it a final go on ShowHN one night, and to our joy, we were received with much love from the community, a wonderful surprise for the whole team, and a sleepless night for @pranavrajs, replying to comments. Chatwoot hasn’t stopped growing ever since.

Almost a Year Later

The work that the Chatwoot community does, matters!

Despite the adversities since the beginning of 2020, the Chatwoot community continues to generate moments that have carried us through these tough times.

This article was originally published on the Chatwoot blog by Sojan Jose. The original article can be found at https://www.chatwoot.com/blog/woot-journals-one-year-since-open-sourcing-chatwoot{:target=“_blank” rel=“noopener noreferrer”}.