The Importance of Consumption in Open Source

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I've probably learned the most from chatting with people, current or former at MongoDB. There are a lot of similarities and our models and approaches and cultures to some extent there. But we've also been really inspired by how Snowflake has grown, particularly with how they think about consumption as part of a key part of their business model. The cloud providers have been huge for us... We're still our pain points and challenges as we think about this. A lot of our products start that way too.

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.