How to Start Commercializing an Open Source Project

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If a founder who got an open source project off the ground that has interesting early traction, wanted your advice on how to think about starting to commercialize it. First question I would ask is, can you think of some features that your biggest users of it have reached out to you about or maybe they've even started to contribute back to? That's maybe one category, a pure like open core model. And then the other category would be, is it pretty difficult to run this? And if so, do you think your users would pay for you to manage it and run it for them and they just put in a credit card or buy it from you? So those would be the first questions

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.