
Selling to Developers [audio] - shubhamjain
http://a16z.com/2016/04/13/selling-to-developers-open-source-business-models/
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tbarbugli
TL;DL?

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shubhamjain
I can't recall every bit of the podcast but these are a few points that were
mentioned —

\- In the past five years, developers have gained a nontrivial influence in
purchasing decisions of enterprises.

\- Developers look forward to buying tools that they can use. They are, more
or less, unmotivated by marketing talk.

\- The business model of selling support and maintenance / services over a
fully open source core (RedHat, MySQL) is not a usually a great idea. Both of
those companies took a long time to built their Open Source base.

\- The better approach is to have parts of your product open source while
still having significant benefits to up-sell.

\- The best B2D companies would the ones that can execute sales on two levels
— the developers who will be the end-user of the product, and head of IT
departments (like, CIOs).

\- Open source is likely a great marketing tool for selling to developers but
it should be regarded as an important one — more precisely, your best
engineers should work on your open source core, instead of your proprietary
product. (I have personally seen companies focusing on doing open source only
in a shoddy way).

