Build for Dual Audiences with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz

About this episode

Emily Omier interviews Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz about Penpot's transition to a product company and its unique business model catering to dual audiences.

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz , CEO and co-founder of Penpot. We started out by talking about the transition from services company to product company, how they decided to pivot to building a product company and when they made the decision to go all-in on the product. Perhaps the most interesting part of the conversation is the discussion of the business model. It’s almost like open core in reverse. Penpot open source is fully featured and very flexible; but there’s a separate product available for business stakeholders to control how Penpot is used in their organizations. So when you need gouvernance and control, you should pay for the additional product to control Penpot usage in your organization. But if you don’t need to limit how Penpot is used at all, you (and everyone else in your organization) can use the open source version without the additional controls. We also talked about dual audiences. Penpot has to appeal to designers and developers, and building something (and ultimately marketing/selling it) that has to appeal to two very different stakeholders. We talked about how the company manages that balance, and why they want to…

People in this episode

Host: Emily Omier

Guest: Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz

Topics covered

• open source
• business model
• product development
• dual audiences
• governance
• designers and developers

Keywords

• open source
• Penpot
• business model
• designers
• developers
• governance
• product company
• dual audiences

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Penpot

Places: Paris

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