Episode description

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick , the co-CEO of Grist Labs and CTO of Grist Labs. We talked about managing growth of users versus growth of revenue, moving to an open source approach for technical, not technical, reasons, and open-source related product management questions for open source companies. 

Some really interesting themes we talked about:

• Moving from a SaaS first approach to also focusing on enterprise sales. Why they did that, what other sales channels that opened and what questions it also forced the company to address
• User personas versus buyer personas
• The situations in which Grist is the best option — which incidentally I could not understand from the website or the project documentation
• The relationship between the open source project and both enterprise sales and SaaS sign-ups. 
• How open source has been critical for a strategic relationship Grist has with the French government, which has been important for increasing product development velocity
• Giving up ‘darlings’ or features that they really want to develop but that they don’t think would drive revenue
• The difference Anais sees between running Grist and running non-open-source companies — one of the most interesting differences is that users often have a sense of ownership over the project that you just wouldn’t see in a fully proprietary 
• How open source true believers often work in large companies and control budgets, and should not be underestimated. 
• Why trying to sell based on features — including telling yourself that if you just had one more feature, you’d unlock all the sales — was a big mistake. 

Are you struggling with price anchors fixed around zero dollars, or can’t figure out how to manage the push and pull of developing open source and building a business? You might want to work with me.