Aaron Mitchell had a pricing change ready to go. The messages had gone out. The website had been updated. Then the app submission was rejected: Freeplay depended on unsupported versions of Xcode and React Native. The launch would have to wait eight weeks while the team upgraded and tested its software. Somewhere between the announcement and the release, yesterday’s engineering decision had acquired control of tomorrow’s business.
Mitchell tells this story on himself. He remembers the appeal of building with free software. “Free is great. I like free.” He also remembers being the product manager who deferred the upgrade an engineer requested. There was a roadmap to deliver. Maintenance could have the next sprint. The next sprint, naturally, had other plans.
Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of HeroDevs, a company selling continued support for open-source software after its original support ends. His career has brought him around to a problem he once helped postpone.
The pizza that became a business lesson
Before the software came a small-town Oregon upbringing. Mitchell grew up on the coast, with small businesses forming much of his early picture of working life. His later product work would put him in contact with companies operating on a very different scale. His consulting résumé includes Twitter, Sony, ADT and Siemens.
One college economics class supplied a memorable introduction to willingness to pay. A professor auctioned a five-dollar pizza to a room of hungry students. Bidding reached $35. Mitchell’s account of the incident centers on the discovery that a customer’s circumstances could make a solution worth considerably more than its apparent sticker price. The pizza had done some teaching before anyone ate it.
He tried several businesses, including the ride-sharing concept Skedaddle and a loyalty-card app called Groopies. Freeplay eventually took him into LAUNCH Accelerator in January 2019. Before that, he funded the work through his product management job at Domo.
The background matters to the present-day role. Mitchell came to software support with experience choosing what to build, selling a product and answering to its users. For a customer, a software decision arrives attached to existing commitments. A technically appealing change still has to fit into a working business.
A sandwich is sometimes a research budget
Freeplay gave Mitchell another lesson in the difference between a founder’s plan and a buyer’s priorities. After a stretch of building features without growth, the team spent $30 on Jimmy John’s sandwiches and gathered a user group. Within half an hour, customers had made a request clear: they wanted family plans. The team spent two weeks introducing them. Mitchell reported that growth followed.
His account also takes aim at a product founder’s comfortable refuge: making more product. Design and development were familiar territory. Distribution required a separate effort, and waiting for the next release did little to solve it. He wrote candidly about the temptation to explain every business problem with another feature.
A customer meeting offers an awkward kind of efficiency. It can make a carefully arranged backlog look less necessary. It can also save a small team from spending another month polishing the wrong thing. Sandwiches are unusually inexpensive equipment for that particular job.
The roadmap had room for the next feature. The old software had a deadline of its own.
The Freeplay predicament
Software has a second calendar
The public talks kept returning to the work around aging code. At All Things Open in 2024, Mitchell’s session addressed persuading a business to upgrade an old application. In 2025, he returned with a talk about technical debt and aging open source. These were business conversations as much as engineering ones: someone has to agree to fund a change whose immediate benefit may be avoiding trouble later.
HeroDevs’ Never-Ending Support offers commercially maintained replacements for older open-source packages. Customers can keep an existing application supported while deciding when to migrate. That changes the scheduling question. Security work can proceed without requiring every organization to undertake an immediate rewrite of the software around it.
The appeal is concrete. An application can remain useful after the community maintaining a particular version has moved on. The organization running it still has users, obligations and other projects. A support deadline and a business deadline are separate entries on the calendar. They do not politely arrange themselves into the same week.
A conceptual view of the timing problem HeroDevs addresses. This illustration represents a sequence, not measured durations.
In February 2026, HeroDevs signed a reseller agreement with Japan’s Electronic Service Initiative. The arrangement added Japanese contracting, domestic payments and local support. Even a product sold as a drop-in replacement needs a way into the customer’s organization. Procurement and language have calendars too.
The next step, without the drama
There is a smaller account of Mitchell’s working style in a conversation involving Wendy Hurst, who had handled project management for HeroDevs’ professional services. She described telling him about projects going off the rails. Her description involved a train whose caboose had somehow reached the front. It was a vivid status report. It was less useful as an itinerary.
Hurst remembered his advice as a request for calm and clarity. A project manager cannot control every developer, obstacle or estimate. The next action is still available. If a plan has stopped working, recommend another. If an answer is missing, say so and explain how the team will find it.
She credited the conversation with changing how she approached her work and helping clients feel more confident. Her retelling is explicitly her summary of the advice, rather than a transcript of Mitchell’s words. Its practical point is modest enough to use on an ordinary Tuesday: after explaining what went wrong, explain what happens next.
Growing without erasing the beginning
His executive recruiting posts offer another view of the work. Searching for a chief financial officer, Mitchell described a company that had reached the stage where an experienced finance leader needed a seat at the table. He wanted a partner in shaping the business. A spreadsheet could presumably remain part of the equipment.
When recruiting a chief marketing officer, he began by naming Hayden Baillio and Wendy Hurst and thanking the small team that had built the function. They had covered brand, demand, content, events, community and the website. The next hire would build on that work as HeroDevs expanded.
Growing teams often turn one person’s list of duties into several people’s job descriptions. Acknowledging who carried the original list makes the transition more legible. Mitchell’s public explanation gave prospective executives a business problem to solve while giving the existing team credit for reaching that point.
The January 2026 CEO appointment followed years of shared leadership with Aaron Frost. Frost remained involved as an advisor and board member. Mitchell emphasized preserving the values they had built together while developing the company further. “HeroDevs has always been a shared effort,” he said.
Who stays after a version ends?
There is a corresponding question on the maintainer’s side of the software. Enterprises want dependable support. Open-source creators need room to move their projects forward. HeroDevs announced a $20 million Open Source Sustainability Fund in June 2025, with grants intended for creators and projects following end-of-life best practices. The published award range was $2,500 to $250,000.
Mitchell’s announcement of the fund focused on the people responsible for the software. A project can begin as a personal interest and accumulate obligations far beyond its original scope. Planning the end of support means communicating with users, handling expectations and providing a path forward. Those tasks consume time even when the code is available without a purchase price.
He has also publicly introduced HeroDevs’ free End-of-Life Data Set, designed to help teams identify unsupported dependencies and associated vulnerabilities. Visibility comes before a useful decision. It is difficult to plan around a component nobody remembers installing.
A faster discovery still needs a response
In May 2026, Mitchell joined Mike Vizard on Techstrong TV to discuss AI-assisted vulnerability discovery. Their conversation considered the resulting pressure on maintainers, security teams and enterprises. Finding a problem is one stage of the work. Verifying it, preparing a fix and getting that fix into running software create further demands.
The following month, he appeared on Steve Taplin’s Software Leaders Uncensored podcast, discussing open source, AI, remote teams and software security. These conversations put the company’s original scheduling problem in a busier setting. More discoveries mean more decisions about which work happens first, and who has the capacity to do it.
In July, Mitchell joined the OpenJS Foundation board as a Gold Director. The appointment placed him alongside representatives from other organizations participating in the JavaScript ecosystem. He now holds a formal role in a shared institution as well as leading a commercial support provider.
Away from the version numbers
Mitchell lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and is a father of three. His conference biography mentions longboarding and spending time with his sons. The personal details are uncomplicated; they also provide some welcome air after a conversation about unsupported dependencies.
A HeroDevs gathering in the Dominican Republic supplied another detail. Writing about the value of meeting remote colleagues in person, he admitted that he had missed the instruction to pack a white outfit for the final reception dinner. Even a company devoted to keeping things supported can have a wardrobe compatibility problem.
That post described investing in time together for people who may otherwise know one another through a screen. For the CEO, the work includes maintaining those relationships alongside the products and contracts. The next version of a company still has to carry the people who built the current one.