How Grafana Accelerated Go to Market

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When I joined Grafana, we were called around 10 million of ARR so not a small company by company standards and certainly startups but not a huge company either. We found in what we believed and it's always harder to see this when you're in it but we believe that we had some version of product market fit and that we were ready to step on the gas. It was very iterative for a while until we got our recent compliments that we were onto something and it was worth really scaling.

Our guest today is Douglas Hanna , Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs.

Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization. Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk. At Grafana Labs, Douglas has been instrumental in scaling GTM at the open-source company — building up both team headcount and its revenue model.

In our conversation today, Douglas dives deep into the process of bringing products to market at an open-source company.

We explore the different facets of building and scaling a revenue model at an open-source company. Douglas opens up the GTM playbook at Grafana Labs sharing:

When to commercialize a feature vs. switch to a hosted version of a product
Tried and tested frameworks for pricing and packaging
How Grafana Labs thinks about what to put behind a paywall
How the GTM team was built over time.,

You can follow Douglas on Twitter at @douglashanna. You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.