Building a Dual Growth Flywheel at GitLab with Nick Veenhof

About this episode

Emily Omier interviews Nick Veenhof about GitLab's open source strategies and contributor success.

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nick Veenhof, Director of Contributor Success at GitLab. GitLab has probably the most well-articulated open source strategy out there, and we talked about the two main prongs of that strategy, the co-create strategy and the dual flywheel strategy. We also talked about incentivizing individuals versus incentivizing companies and how to build recognition system as part of the way to encourage people to contribute. We also talked about how to make sure that contributing is accessible — thinking about the “time to success” for contributors in a similar way as how you would think about time to value for software users. The dual flywheel strategy This strategy is based on the idea that as an open source company you want to simultaneously push growth in your open source user base and your customer base, and that the two should reinforce each other. The co-create strategy The co-create strategy involves encouraging paying customers to contribute to the open source project. In other words, customers who are already paying are encouraged to also invest engineering resources to improve the product. Nick said that this has obvious…

People in this episode

Host: Emily Omier

Guest: Nick Veenhof

Topics covered

• open source strategy
• growth strategies
• contributor success
• co-create strategy
• dual flywheel strategy

Keywords

• GitLab
• open source
• contributor success
• co-create strategy
• dual flywheel strategy
• incentivizing contributions
• recognition system

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: GitLab

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