GitLab Co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij

2. How to innovate faster with community:
Insights from co-creating product with
community with GitLab’s CEO
Sid Sijbrandij
Co-Founder and CEO
GitLab
@sytses
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3. 1. The start of the GitLab community
2. Customer impact of open core and source available
3. Building trust and fostering wider community engagement
4. GitLab wider community examples
Topics
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4. GitLab’s journey began in 2011
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Dmitriy Zaporozhets
Co-founder & Creator of GitLab
Kharkiv, Ukraine
2011
Dmitriy created an Open Source
collaboration tool, GitLab
Garnered interest
through the Ruby
subreddit and Twitter
GitLab received
300+ contributions
in its first year

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A global
community
of contributors

6. The company is part of the community
GitLab
team
members
Customers
Volunteers
Translators
+
Bug
bounty
hunters
Community
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7. ● Helps co-create the product
● Provides feedback
● Creates awareness and champions
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An active wider community
is an incredible asset

8. Dual-flywheel strategy
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*As of Oct 2021
This year, we’ve merged
on average 335 wider
community code
contributions per month*
New product
version
released
121 months
in a row*

9. 1. The start of the GitLab community
2. Customer impact of open core and source available
3. Building trust and fostering wider community engagement
4. GitLab wider community examples
Topics
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10. Open core with source-available code
Open source
“core” functionality
● Free and open source “core”
functionality
● Additional functionality is
proprietary and monetized
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Source-available
proprietary code
● Requires payment to use in
production
● Customers can download,
modify, and submit
modifications

11. Open core empowers our customers
● Customers accelerate features
● Users in paid tiers made over 50% of
overall wider community contributions
from January to October 2021
● New features benefit other customers
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12. GitLab has a dollar-based gross retention rate of 97%*
Open core fosters brand loyalty
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*For each of FY2020 and FY2021
I value the relationships I’ve built
with GitLab team members, many
even feel like mentors. They've
taught me so much, and I appreciate
the time they take out of their day to
chat with me, whether it be work
related or otherwise. I love the
approach and the mentality."
— Lee Tickett, Core Team

13. Business benefits of open core model
1. Enables investments in a free, open source offering
2. Allows monetization of proprietary features
3. Empowers customer to co-create
4. Fuels dual-flywheel growth with contributions from the wider community
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14. 1. The start of the GitLab community
2. Customer impact of open core and source available
3. Building trust and fostering wider community engagement
4. GitLab wider community examples
Topics
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15. a. Transparency about project direction
b. Conflicts of interest
c. Lack of company engagement in open channels
Typical challenges with building trust
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16. 1. The start of the GitLab community
2. Customer impact of open core and source available
3. Building trust and fostering wider community engagement
a. Transparency: Align company values with open source ethos
b. Conflict of interest: Pick a business model that balances revenue with
wider community needs
c. Engagement: Invest in wider community engagement & growth
4. GitLab wider community examples
Topics
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17. Policy:
1. Development in the open
2. Business in the open
3. Provide a clear direction
We continuously demonstrate this
commitment, including in our recent public
listing on October 14, 2021
A commitment to transparency
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https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/01/11/being-a-good-open-source-steward/

18. Our stewardship page includes:
1. Business model explanation
2. Criteria to choose paid-only
features
3. How open source benefits from
open core
Clearly stated business practices
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https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/

19. Some of our promises:
1. Free features will remain free
2. Not artificially limiting or delaying
features for the free tier
3. Free tier will have essential features to
run public and private repositories
4. The majority of features built by
GitLab Inc. will be open source
Specific stewardship promises
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20. 1. The start of the GitLab community
2. Customer impact of open core and source available
3. Building trust and fostering wider community engagement
a. Transparency: Align company values with open source ethos
b. Conflict of interest: Picking a business model that balances revenue
with wider community needs
c. Engagement: Invest in wider community engagement & growth
4. GitLab wider community examples
Topics
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21. 1. Donations: ice cream money
2. Consultancy: margins would limit investments in unpaid work
3. Paid development: coordination, waiting
4. Support: limited long-term benefits
5. Packaging: hinders adoption
6. ICO: no longer available
7. Data: still new, data sparse tech
8. SaaS only: unmet market need for self-managed
9. Single Tenant Service: very complex
10. Hardware: didn’t try
11. Open core: we chose this
Business models we considered
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22. Buyer-based open core business
We evaluated multiple options to decide what features to monetize:
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● Based on SDLC stage
● Based on company size
● Based on DevSecOps maturity
● Based on buyer
Want adoption across stages
Small companies sometimes need all
Early companies may want everything
Works really well

23. 1. The start of the GitLab community
2. Customer impact of open core and source available
3. Building trust and fostering wider community engagement
a. Transparency: Align company values with open source ethos
b. Conflict of interest: Picking a business model that balances revenue
with wider community needs
c. Engagement: Invest in wider community engagement & growth
4. GitLab wider community examples
Topics
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24. Some KPIs we use:
● Wider community contributor counts
● Monthly wider community contributions merged
● MRARR: multiply a customer’s merge request count by their ARR
Measure community investments ROI
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25. ● GitLab for Education
● GitLab for Open Source
● GitLab for Startups
Growing the wider community
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26. ● Merge request coaches: help contributors bring work over the finish line
● Hackathon: events to engage, support, and reward contributors
Motivate and coach contributors
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27. Recognize your top contributors
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Core Team

28. 1. Focus recruitment efforts outside the wider community
2. Stick to your stewardship promises
3. Set clear performance indicators for community engagement
4. Start building community early
Things to watch out for
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29. 1. The start of the GitLab community
2. Customer impact of open core and source available
3. Building trust and fostering wider community engagement
a. Transparency: Aligning company values with open source ethos
b. Conflict of interest: Picking a business model that balances revenue
with wider community needs
c. Engagement: Investing in community growth & engagement
4. GitLab wider community examples
Topics
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30. “We really try to bring the open
source culture in, and so far, we
really succeeded. With CI/CD, we
have one and a half million builds
every month. The whole culture
has completely changed.”
Fabio Huser
Software Architect at Siemens Smart Infrastructure
Problem → Siemens’ development teams
needed a platform for code
collaboration and enhanced DevOps
workflow.
Solution → GitLab Free
Result → GitLab enables over 6.5m +
builds per month (over 210K per day).
There are zero support cases and over
4 full production deploys per month.
With over 40,000 GitLab users, Siemens
teams contribute heavily to GitLab with
over 150 merged MRs in GitLab.
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31. Wider community heroes
I've been able to advance my
skills with the contributions
I've been making to the
GitLab code base. I've grown
professionally and of course
I've also grown in terms of
having better relationships."
— Marvin Karegyeya,
GitLab Hero
The best part of the GitLab
community is the support and
the network."
— Akanksha Bhasin,
GitLab Hero
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32. Community
1. Millions of users
2. 2,700+ code contributors, all time
3. 2,000+ translators, 55 languages
4. 15K meetup contributors, 33 countries
5. 96 GitLab Heroes
6. 1 million education users
7. 25K forum members, 800K pageviews/month
8. 10K Reddit members
Contributions
1. 75 unique code contributors each month on average.*
2. 335 code contributions each month on average.*
Data as of October 2021
*Monthly avgs based on January to October 2021
Wider community by the numbers
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33. Business Impact
1. 121 months in a row of releasing a new version on the 22nd of each month*
2. 58% growth in revenue: $42.2 million in Q3 FY2021 , $68.8 million in Q3 FY2022
3. Over 60% of annual recurring revenue came from enterprise customers in FY2021
4. 97% dollar-based gross retention rate in both FY2020 and FY2021
*As of October 2021
Buyer-based open core by the numbers
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34. Dual-flywheel
Contributions lead
to more revenue
and contributions
Align community strategy, value and
business model
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Company values
Transparency,
clear stewardship
promises
Business model
Buyer-based open
core, potential for
high revenue and
contributions
Investments
Engage, support,
and grow wider
community
*As of Oct 2021

35. Q&A
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