Playbook to convert open sources users to enterprise customers

[00:00.14] ‍

Hi, I'm Piyush, co-founder at Reo.Dev. The first step is to build a strong differentiation between your open-source product and your enterprise tier. Why should a company which is using your open-source product really upgrade? Generally, this can be some feature gating. For instance, it can be features related to scaling up or team collaboration, security, compliance, or anything else. But the question to answer is, is the value proposition really that strong for somebody who's getting value for free to start paying for it? Once you've figured this out, the next step is to figure out who is using your open source product. A lot of open source companies have a lot of GitHub stars, a big community, a billion Docker pulls. But if you don't know who these companies are, who these people are, it will not help you generate revenue. It's very important to understand who's using your open source product. I have a developer tool founder friend, and he did not know that Tesla is using their product, and that is almost criminal. The next step is to qualify. Not every company using your open source product is going to buy. A lot of them could be hobbyists or freelancers or students.

[01:21.11] 

So you need to figure out, out of all of your users, who looks like a potential customer. You can qualify based on company size, geography, industry, industry, the number of engineers in that team, and so many other criteria. And that is how you can go down from the 5,000 community members to the 500 companies that your sales and marketing teams should be talking to, should be focusing on. So that's qualify. The next step is prioritize. The typical developer tool buying journey is pretty long, and there's a long evaluation that happens. It can start with the developer discovering your product, and then moving on to learning about it, evaluating whether it does solve their problem? Does it integrate with their technology stack? Once they're done with this, they might build a POC, they might do the first Hello World, and they in fact might start using it in production before they even consider buying. If you don't have visibility of these stages, it becomes very hard to know who is ready to buy today and who is very early in the buying journey. So understanding the developer buying stages and arranging your prospects across these stages is very important.

[02:28.24] 

And then your marketing team can focus on nurturing the top of the funnel, and your sales teams can just go to the bottom of the funnel and start converting. And then finally, once you've done all of this, now you need to go out and sell. Now is the time to get the CTO or the VP inch or the CSO on a call and try to convert. Now, this is easier said than done, but if you've done the steps leading to this stage diligently, then it becomes a hell lot easier to do this. You have a lot of data on how this company has been using your open source. You might even know who in this company is using your product, and you can use that as an in. You can make a very customized sales pitch and try to convert, try to pitch your enterprise offering. So this is the five-step playbook. Done properly, this playbook has seen results, and we hope this works for you.