In Depth

The go-to-market guide for open-source companies — Douglas Hanna, COO Grafana Labs

May 11, 2023

01:05:14

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

The Importance of Open Source Software

01:20

How to Balance Risk and Opportunity Properly

01:20

Introduction

4min

How to Monetize an Open Source Business

3min

How to Start Commercializing an Open Source Project

2min

How to Start an Open Source Project

3min

The Challenges of Commercializing Open Source Software

2min

How Grafana Accelerated Go to Market

2min

The Early Revenue Generation for Grafana Enterprise

2min

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

2min

How to Hire the Right People for Your Company

2min

10.

The Importance of Open Source Experience in Sales

2min

11.

The Differences Between Open Source and Traditional SAS

3min

12.

The Differences Between Zendesk and Grafana

2min

13.

How to Interview for Drive-in Curiosity

2min

14.

The Evolution of Pricing and Packaging for Grafana Enterprise

3min

15.

How to Make Pricing Decisions That Work

4min

16.

How to Sell Into a Technical Developer-Oriented Audience

3min

17.

The Evolution of Our Sales Structure Over Time

4min

18.

How to Hire the Right People for Your Open Source Business

3min

19.

How to Hire More Reps

2min

20.

How to Run and Instrumentate a Go-to-Market Team

2min

21.

The Importance of Pipeline Creation

3min

22.

How to Get Good Marketing Virtualization Right in Open Source

4min

23.

The Importance of Paying for Open Source Software

3min

24.

The Importance of Consumption in Open Source

2min

25.

How to Measure and Reward Your Sales Team for Consumption

3min

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.