How I Learned to Build an Open Source First Closed Source, Go to Market Function

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It was definitely a learning experience and it was also a little bit of a culture shock going from a customer service offer company to an observability software company. I literally had a folder on my desktop with I think I called it things I don't know. And about once a week for eight or nine weeks, I would have effectively a tutoring session with one of our technical leaders. We're asking particularly the team what's going well, what have you learned so far? Where do you think our opportunities are?"

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.