Thank you for joining me for this first episode of Open Source Founders Podcast! In preparation for Open Source Founders Summit, I’m interviewing speakers and attendees about the lessons they’ve learned from building open source companies.
In this first episode, I spoke with Pierre Burgy, co-founder and CEO of Strapi. We went deep on business models… in particular, Pierre is convinced that open source companies should default to a SaaS business model — in other words, unless there is a compelling reason to go the enterprise on-prem route, SaaS will generally be the best way to monetize for open source companies.
A couple concrete takeaways from our conversation:
- Strapi raised $15 million before it had any revenue… but that does not mean you can do that, now. It’s a good reminder that something that worked for one company two, three or five years ago will not necessarily work now.
- It’s very important to pick one business model and iterate on it, because if you try to do both SaaS and open core, you won’t be able to optimize for either, because they are very different machines.
- A SaaS business model and a enterprise distribution business model require not only a completely different approach to GTM, but also different competencies on the team. At Strapi, when they added the cloud product, they didn’t allow the sales team (which had previously been focused on enterprise sales only) to sell the cloud product at all, because the sales people talked to enterprise customers only and the cloud product isn’t appropriate for them. This also made things more straightforward for the sales team.