The Business of Open Source12 Feb 2024

OSFS Special Episode: Peter Zaitsev Talks Sales

As part of the preparation for Open Source Founders Summit, I’m interviewing both our speakers and our attendees for a special podcast that’s hyper focused on one thing. In this episode I spoke with Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona, about sales. We talked about the specifics of sales as a bootstrapped company — which means sales are exceptionally critical from the beginning, and how sales changed as the company moved from a consulting model to a support model on the open source software that Percona creates.

Also, this episode was recorded on site at OpenUK’s State of Open Con!

Here’s the concrete takeaways from this episode:

Even before starting the company, Peter had built up a personal brand as a MySql expert — this is what made it possible for him to get consulting gigs pretty much immediately
Peter’s personal brand wasn’t just around MySql in general, but was very specifically focused on MySql performance optimization
How a growing team meant that the sales process had to get much more disciplined — and deal sizes had to get bigger so that it’s worth the sales team’s time
How to align sales incentives with your business goals — how it’s important to adjust sales quotas and incentives so that sales people don’t oversell, which can hurt your reputation long-term, and don’t sell long-term agreements at too much of a discount.
Why it’s important to separate out your revenue that comes from new customers and your revenue that comes from customer renewals, and how to do so in the organization

If you want more opportunities to go in-depth on sales for open source companies — and to discuss sales and other aspects of business development with other founders, join us May 27th and 28th in Paris at Open Source Founders Summit.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(279)

A Product Strategy Framework for Going from Closed to Open Source

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Kris Zyp, SVP of engineering at HarperDB, in the third and final episode in the series about how Harper went from a closed-source company t...

18 Aug 31min

Giving your Users a Well-Lit Path with Matt Watson

In today’s episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Matt Watson, CEO of Fullscale, about a number of topics related to product development and how AI is changing that. Let’s start with a q...

10 Aug 34min

Interviewing your Target Customers to Accelerate Product-Market Fit

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talk with Julien Verlaguet, the CEO of Skiplabs. Julien is a programming language guy, and we talked about what it means to maintain an open source programm...

3 Aug 37min

Making AI an Opportunity with Joshua Drake

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Joshua Drake, president and CTO of Command Prompt, about business management, bootstrapping versus taking investment, and AI, open source ...

30 Juli 40min

From Closed to Open: Shortening Sales Cycles with Stephen Goldberg

This week on The Business of Open Source, I chatted with Stephen Goldberg, co-founder of Harper, about the process of taking Harper from a closed-source software company to a open source company. I al...

6 Juli 33min

Does AI Make Open Core Models More Difficult? with Sam Alba

Today on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Sam Alba, co-founder of Mendral, formerly of Dagger, and the first hire at Docker. We talked a lot about about how AI is changing the developer tools ...

2 Juli 39min

Closed to Open Source Series: Doing Open Source "Right" with Ethan Arrowood

One of the myths that swirl around the open source company ecosystem is that all open source companies started as an open source project that then suddenly got traction, and followed by the founders f...

22 Juni 40min

The Value of Code is Dropping to Zero with Yann Lechelle

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with Yann Lechelle, Executive President of :Probabl.Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation was about whether or not there is a r...

15 Juni 42min