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OPEN SOURCE David Cramer twitter.com/zeeg AS A BUSINESS Tuesday, July 2, 13
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This is a story about Sentry Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Tuesday, July 2, 13
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It started with a "How do I.." Tuesday, July 2, 13
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django-db-log (2008) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Basically awful, yet DISQUS found value in it Tuesday, July 2, 13
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django-sentry (2010) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Sentry (2011) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Sentry (Today) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Maintained by the Community Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Officially we maintain clients in PHP, Python, JavaScript, and Ruby Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Realistically we only write Python Tuesday, July 2, 13
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An unfortunate truth Tuesday, July 2, 13
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All is not lost! Tuesday, July 2, 13
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A large ecosystem of developers Raven.NET chef-sentry-handler heka-py-raven logging (R) metlog-raven nagios-sentry pyramid_sentry raven-asc3 raven-cfml raven-cpp raven-csharp raven-erlang raven-go raven-grails raven-java raven-js raven-node raven-objc raven-osx raven-php raven-python raven-ruby raven-sh raven-ssas sentry-assign sentry-bitbucket sentry-campfire sentry-facebook sentry-github sentry-groveio sentry-hipchat sentry-irc sentry-irccat sentry-jira sentry-jsonmailprocessor sentry-notifico sentry-notifry sentry-pivotal sentry-plugin-ipaddresses sentry-sprintly sentry-sprunge sentry-trello sentry-youtrack symfony-amg-sentry-plugin Tuesday, July 2, 13
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The value of open source is not in others maintaining your code Tuesday, July 2, 13
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The community builds things we cannot or will not build ourselves Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Companies get value in recruiting efforts and visibility in the technology world Tuesday, July 2, 13
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On To Business Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Why start a company? Tuesday, July 2, 13
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"You should create an AddOn out of Sentry" - @craigkerstiens (Heroku) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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"Beer money? That can't be that hard!" - Overconfident me Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Three months later I spent Christmas building @getsentry on Heroku Tuesday, July 2, 13
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While waiting for Heroku's AddOn validation we decided we could collect money using Stripe Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Two days later we finally had our first paying customer (Feb 28, 2012) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Shout out to @mattrobenolt Tuesday, July 2, 13
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(who also wrote raven-js and raven-node) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Our Guiding Principals Tuesday, July 2, 13
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#1: Nothing is Free Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We must create a sustainable hosted platform, but always remember people can host it themselves Tuesday, July 2, 13
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#2: Don't Over Charge Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We bill based on what costs us money There is no per-seat, or per-project pricing Tuesday, July 2, 13
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#3: Open Source First Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We will not fork Sentry and the only private code is our subscription management and billing Tuesday, July 2, 13
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#4: Our Ideas are Best Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Listen to feedback, but never compromise the platform by adding features just because they're requested Tuesday, July 2, 13
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"Lean" Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Early on our entire mission was simply "Don't spend any money" Tuesday, July 2, 13
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If you continually take a loss it's hard to prove that it's worth driving forward Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Heroku helped us get launched by covering our bill for the first three months Tuesday, July 2, 13
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SoftLayer put us into their incubator program giving us $1,000 in credit per month Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Most importantly we were charging from day one Tuesday, July 2, 13
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OnPremise vs OnDemand Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We don't try to compete with customers who want to host it themselves Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We focus on minimizing costs by targeting small to medium sized businesses Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Making the platform work for every type customers is extremely challenging Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Example: We need to manage quotas but the self-hosted version probably doesn't care Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Solution: (Try to) make everything extensible so @getsentry just hooks into public APIs Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Lessons in Pricing Tuesday, July 2, 13
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People are willing to pay a lot more than you'd expect Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Companies are willing to pay more than individuals so target them Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Charge more for features which are primarily targeted at organizations Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We quadrupled our original pricing (for companies) with minimal increase in cost Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Larger companies are much larger in cost (based on our architecture) Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Over time we've decided that our focus should be smaller companies Tuesday, July 2, 13
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The primary downside to focusing on more, smaller customers is the cost of customer support Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Growth Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We have absolutely no idea how it works It's been a little magical for us Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We try to build a product that we love Which in turns leads to a product our users love Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Our belief is that the care we take with our product leads to a successful viral and organic growth Tuesday, July 2, 13
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In turn we're going to focus on content marketing Which translates to us writing useful blog posts Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Seriously though we have no idea what we're doing so we iterate like everything else Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We're Not a Real Company Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Sentry is still a side project Tuesday, July 2, 13
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We built Sentry at DISQUS entirely because we had problems we wanted to solve Tuesday, July 2, 13
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The entire time my co-founder and myself have been full-time employees at other companies Tuesday, July 2, 13
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I personally spend lots of weekends and evenings "working" on @getsentry Tuesday, July 2, 13
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That time spent has made some great things possible both for DISQUS and individuals Tuesday, July 2, 13
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"If you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life" Tuesday, July 2, 13
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Thank You! Tuesday, July 2, 13