text stringlengths 0 2.08k |
|---|
**Mikeal Rogers:** Not in part, I mean in whole. \[laughter\] |
**David Cramer:** Yeah, basically Ryan Dahl was like, "Hey, come work on Node. I need somebody to help with this thing that Joyent is paying me to do", and I happened to be jobless at the time when he said that, so it worked out. But no, I always maintain that npm was my thing and not Joyent's thing. |
Honestly, I think it's sort of tricky -- I don't wanna speak for Joyent, obviously; it's a whole different company than it was when I got hired, and it was a whole different company when I left than when I got hired. It's a whole different company now. But I think for a lot of the time, the view of npm was that it was ... |
Maybe it's just like egotistical, but my point of view has always been Node is the thing that enables npm, and I was mostly trying to keep Node going good and working on it, because I think it's important for the broader JavaScript community, and I think that npm is a central part of that. |
Obviously, I'm biased; this is my pet project, and it was my labor of love long before it was my company, but there was no bad blood as I was leaving. I honestly don't think they really cared that much. It's not like they ever hired people to work on it, or anything like that, and it was never seen as a Joyent product. |
There was some discussion early on, like "Why don't you sell npm to Joyent and then we'll put a team on it?" I think we were several orders of magnitude away from one another in what kind of value we assigned to this thing, so it was not likely to work out. Again, I don't say that in any kind of disparaging way towards... |
Again, I really have nothing disparaging to say about them, it's just there are different types of companies and different types of teams and different skill sets, and it just was not really ever gonna be a good fit, I don't think. So that's a big part of why I made the decision to move or to leave. |
We also explored the option of putting npm in a foundation or creating a foundation for it, and really just focusing on the community/open source aspects of it. The reason why I didn't go that route is that it works out to being about the same amount of work for fundraising to create a foundation as to get a startup of... |
\[15:55\] Another reason why they tend to do that is because it's a nice marketing boon. You see, "Oh, IBM supports WordPress. IBM must not be so bad, because I love WordPress." And because of the sort of background and very developer-centric role that npm occupies, and the fact that I hadn't spent four years marketing... |
So setting up a foundation for it would have been at least as much work and not as much benefit. And then getting a foundation to say, "Look the real challenge here is that we need a private service, and it needs to be a thing that people pay for, because if you don't pay for a thing that's guarding your privacy then h... |
So yeah, in the end we're still on good terms, we're actually still a Joyent customer, for we use a couple of their services. Obviously, we use Node very heavily; we're part of the Node Foundation. It's all generally peaceful and good. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And the last question, was there any concern around -- if you're talking about foundations versus businesses, that being a business and a startup, especially taking venture might be perceived as being at odds with what the community wanted, or just changing your incentives. |
**David Cramer:** Yeah, I think that there is always going to be some concern around incentives anytime you're dealing with people, and the less well you know them, the more concerned you're gonna be about their incentives. When somebody's your friend, you can kind of have a little bit more of that sort of natural prim... |
But in general, there are some really interesting things about the JavaScript community in particular. The JavaScript community in particular is pretty pro-business and they're pretty open-minded about things like that. It's a sort of interesting melting pot, because almost every application touches JavaScript, touches... |
WordPress already sort of crossed a lot of these bridges for us. There is a bunch of other examples of relatively healthy open source projects that were in some way tied to a company or to a foundation, or just some sort of hodgepodge - a foundation made up of several companies. So having a profit motive - for a lot of... |
It's all open source, it's all very clear what we're doing. We're trying to be as transparent as possible, which I think is key when you're interacting with an open source community. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** David, what are your thoughts on that? I mean, Sentry obviously has a very different community. How did they respond to the venture announcement? |
**Isaac Schlueter:** \[19:45\] The venture announcement - it's all been like "Thanks", "Yeah, good luck!", "It was awesome!" We have a few people - we'll call them the Hacker News crowd, who always question everything. \[laughter\] But yeah, in general it's been good. The reason we kicked off the SaaS fundamentally was... |
We're very different now than we were a few years ago. Mostly the product's significantly better and we're able to do a lot more, and we're able to make it a lot more accessible. But you have a lot of the negative nancies that are like, "Oh, Sentry charges $10/month now. They're gonna start charging New Relic process." |
So we had a little bit of that, but from our actual customers and our actual users, everybody was thrilled. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's great. I like where this is going a lot. We're gonna take a short break and then when we come back we're gonna talk a little bit about how these projects make money, and I think I'm just gonna ask outright how much they both make, as in salary. \[laughs\] No, I'm not gonna do that. We'll be ri... |
**Break:** \[21:04\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And we're back from the break. Now let's get into how y'all make money. How do Sentry and npm the companies make money? Really quickly, and then we'll kind of go from there. |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, so Sentry is a simple SaaS service. We actually have a tiered business model... Nearly all of our revenue comes from SaaS. More than our SaaS customers, we have free open source users and also those free open source users happen to be the largest companies. There's some tradeoffs to be made t... |
Longer term we're looking at how we monetize the enterprise without creating what I call crippleware - that is like an open core product. We're trying to prove that we can be successful without that, and I think we can. So we've started exploring some of that, but fundamentally the SaaS is what's gotten us off the grou... |
**David Cramer:** For npm, we have two main products. One is npm Enterprise, which is a standalone registry that you can spin up really easily inside of your company's infrastructure, and it integrates with SAML or LDAP or whatever special snowflake authorization/authentication system you might have. |
Then we have a private modules SaaS system that you can use for organizations and teams. We shipped private modules for individuals and then about six months later added the organizational and team features, and what's really interesting is you can see from the registration graphs and the new customer signup graphs tha... |
\[24:06\] The other half were like "There is no way that we're gonna install a thing. We only want a SaaS, we only use SaaS." It's kind of interesting how that's born out in practice almost as if that was a perfectly represented example; it was almost exactly 50/50. |
As far as the open source users, we have about four million people using our service on a regular basis, four million humans. By several approximate measures that you can try and figure out, that's about what it works out to. But much fewer than that are actually paying users, which is sort of fine. I think there's act... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I know that the companies that you're inspired by... I know that npm gets compared a lot to GitHub, some of what you're describing with Sentry reminds me of Travis a little bit. Are there other models that you're going after? |
**David Cramer:** I think GitHub is the one that we definitely get compared to the most. We've basically created our business model almost exactly from them. The funny thing is actually our org's product, we've always charged per seat, because it just seemed like it was the easiest thing to reason about, even though th... |
The most frequent pushback or complaint we got about it is "Why can't you just charge us like GitHub?" and then GitHub changed their pricing model to be per seat, and... Now we do charge you just like GitHub, it's great. |
The other company that I think is a pretty interesting or inspiring model is Wordpress, or Automattic, to be more specific. Just because they've taken something that was a vibrant open source community and really in some very creative ways have spun it into an extremely successful business. |
**Isaac Schlueter:** For Sentry, early on we straight up copy-pasted somebody else's pricing model, and I think they put about as much thought into it as we did, so we're still working on fixing that. |
But in terms of other companies, I actually think GitLab is very interesting. They are in a way similar to Sentry, where the entire product is open source. It's licensed very differently, but they try to ship both. They have an enterprise offering and then they have the SaaS service. You can interact and contribute to ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's funny to hear both of you say that you basically started by copying someone else's model and then tweaked it as you went along. A lot of people that I've talked to who have open source projects, they're interested in monetizing them. They're sort of like, "I have no idea where to start. I have no... |
**David Cramer:** \[28:09\] I don't actually know how to run a business... \[laughter\] That's not exactly true. You just have to very aggressively learn as you go. I think that as far as pricing model, just to get to your first question about copying and pasting somebody else's pricing model and then tweaking it a lit... |
It definitely pays to stop and do some slow thinking about it, and it's been really interesting to hear about some of the thought that went into GitHub's original pricing model and now how they've changed it for their organization's SaaS. Any pricing model is applying a tax to some particular behavior. If you look at i... |
Once you have a big user base, once you have a big community, growing that community bigger is not gonna benefit you more. At this point, GitHub is probably close to nearing saturation of all the open source development that happens on Earth, right? GitLab is obviously a big one, there is also Stash - there are alterna... |
On the other hand, if you say "We're gonna charge per user in your paid organization", now the tax is on having a bunch of people who are not participating in the open source world. Participation in open source remains free, but you want an organization to be on your product and you want them to be using it in the same... |
Applying the tax that way ended up having some weird, perverse incentives. |
That being said, GitHub threw something together, they thought about it for a little while and then they went to market with it, saw how it did and saw what the impacts were. I think you can really easily get yourself into analysis paralysis around that decision and avoid ever building something useful. Yes, there is a... |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, and I think from my side the best advice I have is make money on whatever you're doing. This is not my first time I've attempted doing something on the side, and the lesson I learned each time was if I have to keep showing out money to keep things running, I'm not gonna keep it going, no matt... |
\[31:56\] From day zero, we've never put money into Sentry. We bootstrapped it, we got sponsorship from a couple companies, Heroku and Softlayer, both hosting companies, and from there we were always cash flow positive. Now, we weren't paying ourselves any money at the time, but that didn't matter because we were emplo... |
For example, Sentry gives away free service to open source projects, and I think that there's a lot of companies that will help you out and really help you get off the ground. That varies, because clearly for a SaaS service it's a little bit more straightforward, but I definitely think looking at what other people do a... |
**David Cramer:** I'm incredibly jealous about the luxury of having something that was cash flow positive from day one. We pulled the business together around this ship that was more or less on fire at the time, and had not been cash flow positive. But it's improving. |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Don't worry, the first thing when you take VC funding is to burn it all. \[laughter\] We've since fixed that... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Sometimes when you say the term "open source business", people are thinking about old school enterprise companies. Then I look at Sentry or npm and I'm like, "Oh, these are the cool, new, shiny open source businesses." I don't know whether that's just because y'all are just like newer businesses that ... |
**David Cramer:** I think the biggest difference is that the internet exists now, and it's a real thing. People do things on the internet; they have SaaS systems, they do stuff online... It's less of an assumption that what you're buying is the kind of unlocked version of the crappy open source thing. I think you call ... |
We use a ton of SaaS at npm. We use AWS, we use Joyent, we use Fastly... It would be completely impossible to build this business without leveraging all of those same things. I think when we imagine the stodgy old enterprises, even those are increasingly either selling services or selling very large support contracts. ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.