Introduction

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.