How to Start an Open Source Project

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I think on a generic level, and definitely a little tough to answer that, but if you look at the 10 or 15 organizations or people that are having the most success with your project. Where do their pain points seem to be? Are there pain points running and scaling it? Or are there pain points? Hey, we have a thousand people at our bank that are using this and it's really difficult for us to manage who has access to what feature in your tool. Some tools are gonna be very back-end. Focus, others are gonna be much more pregnant, focused, or administration focused so it really depends on what the open store project is. I'm definitely less of an expert

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.