The Importance of Open Source Software

1min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

If you're paying for those tools, the thinking is you have to pay for Grafana as well. Some of these are one way doors and some of them are two way doors. It's super difficult to take something free and make it paid in open source because literally the code is out there. But that was just a decision where we're like, okay, we think this is the right thing to do at the time we made the decision.

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.