In Depth artwork

The go-to-market guide for open-source companies — Douglas Hanna, COO Grafana Labs

In Depth

English - May 11, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - ★★★★★ - 51 ratings
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Previous Episode: What this 3-time founding team did differently to find product-market fit faster — Jessica McKellar, CTO of Pilot
Next Episode: How to pull off the ‘zoom-in pivot,’ and other lessons in early-stage building with Luminai’s Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran

Our guest today is Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs. 

Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization. Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk. At Grafana Labs, Douglas has been instrumental in scaling GTM at the open-source company — building up both team headcount and its revenue model. 

In our conversation today, Douglas dives deep into the process of bringing products to market at an open-source company.

We explore the different facets of building and scaling a revenue model at an open-source company. Douglas opens up the GTM playbook at Grafana Labs sharing: 

When to commercialize a feature vs. switch to a hosted version of a product

Tried and tested frameworks for pricing and packaging 

How Grafana Labs thinks about what to put behind a paywall 

How the GTM team was built over time., 

You can follow Douglas on Twitter at @douglashanna. You can email us questions directly at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

Our guest today is Douglas Hanna, Chief Operating Officer at Grafana Labs. 


Grafana Labs is an observability stack built around Grafana, a leading open-source technology for dashboards and visualization. Douglas is a seasoned revenue leader, previously leading operations and GTM strategy at Zendesk. At Grafana Labs, Douglas has been instrumental in scaling GTM at the open-source company — building up both team headcount and its revenue model. 


In our conversation today, Douglas dives deep into the process of bringing products to market at an open-source company.


We explore the different facets of building and scaling a revenue model at an open-source company. Douglas opens up the GTM playbook at Grafana Labs sharing: 


When to commercialize a feature vs. switch to a hosted version of a product
Tried and tested frameworks for pricing and packaging 
How Grafana Labs thinks about what to put behind a paywall 
How the GTM team was built over time., 

You can follow Douglas on Twitter at @douglashanna. You can email us questions directly at [email protected] or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.

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