John Britton & Mike McQuaid, Co-Founders of Workbrew and involved in Homebrew, discuss how Homebrew has kept projects simple, value from contributors, ICP shift to dev teams. They explore challenges in maintaining Homebrew, community contributions, project governance, and managing enterprise challenges with Work Brew. They also touch on navigating project and company growth hurdles, sales conversations, and adapting to the startup landscape.
Homebrew's success is attributed to its simple, community-driven approach that engaged users from inception.
Workbrew was initiated to address enterprise pain points by leveraging Homebrew analytics, leading to sales adaptation challenges.
Deep dives
Origin and Growth of Homebrew
Homebrew, a popular package manager, was created in the early days by Max Howell in 2009 out of a need for better package management tools on Mac. What set Homebrew apart was its community-driven approach, engaging users from day one. With over 30 maintainers and thousands of contributors, it has evolved into a widely used tool.
Challenges and Responsibilities of Maintaining Homebrew
Maintaining Homebrew introduced complexities related to scaling, compatibility, and user expectations. Users sometimes accept existing issues as part of using the tool, viewing them as unavoidable 'taxes.' The sense of responsibility and decision-making shifts significantly, transforming individual problems into collective challenges.
Starting Workbrew and Addressing User Pain Points
The inception of Workbrew in 2012 began in response to identified pain points for larger organizations using Homebrew. Leveraging insights from Homebrew usage analytics and user conversations, Workbrew aimed to streamline fleet management, automate deployment, and enhance security protocols to cater to enterprise IT managers.
Navigating Sales and Growth in New Endeavors
Entering the enterprise sales domain from an engineering background posed challenges for Workbrew's founders, requiring adaptation to sales processes and customer interactions. Collaborating with experienced sales professionals and honing go-to-market strategies helped bridge the gap, emphasizing learning and adaptability in new entrepreneurial endeavors.
John Britton & Mike McQuaid are Co-Founders of Workbrew, the company that provides additional features and support for companies using Homebrew. Homebrew's main project, brew, is a wildly popular open source project with 40K GitHub stars and provides the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux).
In this episode, we dig into John & Mike's history with Homebrew and their time together at GitHub, how Homebrew has kept projects simple over time and avoided feature creep, how Homebrew has managed to get a lot of value from contributors, how their ICP has shifted from mac admins to dev and security teams & more!
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