Shomik Ghosh - office hours with a DevTools investor
Feb 23, 2023
auto_awesome
Shomik Ghosh, Partner at boldstart, discusses the pros and cons of open sourcing parts of a software development tool. He also explores targeting a specific community in the React Native ecosystem and the challenges early-stage founders face with large enterprise clients. Additionally, he shares insights on how to effectively sell to sales leaders and founders.
Narrow down your focus to a specific community to build a strong user base and understand their needs better.
Evaluate the tradeoff between landing big enterprise contracts and maintaining a focus on individual developer adoption.
Deep dives
Understanding User Pain Points and Focusing on Open Source Adoption
Start by deeply understanding the pain points of the end users, such as front-end engineers working with React Native. Narrowing down your focus to a specific community helps you build a strong user base and understand their needs better. Prioritize open source adoption, ensuring that the documentation, community support, and ease of use are well-developed. Avoid getting caught up too early in business models and pricing plans as these can be iterated upon later. Instead, focus on building a useful product and solving developer pain points effectively.
Choosing Between Open Source and Proprietary Solutions
Decide whether to open source the entire product or specific parts based on the preferences and behavior of the target developers. Consider if developers in the React Native community are open to exploring new open source projects, contributing, and testing them. Evaluate if allowing developers to access the product's code provides more trust, customization, or flexibility in integrations. Avoid overthinking the proprietary aspects and focus on building trust and ease of use for users. Choose a permissive license, like MIT or Apache, in the early stages to minimize friction and enable widespread adoption.
Balancing Enterprise Customers and Bottoms-Up Adoption
Evaluate the tradeoff between landing big enterprise contracts and maintaining a focus on individual developer adoption. While large contracts from companies like BP can be enticing, they may divert resources and skew the roadmap away from proving the product's value to a wider developer audience. Prioritize validating core hypotheses and getting individual developers to use and advocate for the product. Understand the challenges of scaling a top-down approach versus the benefit of building a strong community and bottom-up adoption. Optimize for learning early and focus on solving pain points for individual users to pave the way for future growth.
Adapting Go-to-Market Strategy for Long-Term Success
Tailor your go-to-market strategy based on user behavior and product type. Differentiate between weightier products that require top-down decision-making and lighter products that can gain traction through individual or team adoption. Assess if a top-down approach is needed to target organizations and decision-makers or if a bottoms-up approach is more suitable for individual developers. Focus on the pain points your product solves and build a loyal user base before considering pricing, delivery models, and scaling. Continuously evaluate and adapt your go-to-market strategy based on user feedback, community engagement, and the product-market fit.