Yup, that sums it up. And to be clear, these have always been our titles, we just didn't have them listed everywhere. Jess's role in the comp committee is new.
And to add to the business model stuff, we'll continue the on-site monetization in the various ways we're already doing so, like sponsors, listings, and new stuff to come, but that's not what we're looking to max out. To us, making open source our core business model is the healthiest approach and the one where we can deliver the most net good with our time and energy. We also have learned through the past couple years of experience that this is be a great market to be in.
Can you explain what that means? It sounds like itβs good for the community but not necessarily for the long-term financial viability of the company.
The business model is selling support for the open-source platform.
making open source our core business model
Let us say ExamPro wanted to run their own version of DEV.to that is focused around Cloud Computing instead of Developers. Since the DEV.to platform is open-source so we can pull the DEV.to repo, provision the servers and maintain the running servers.
Let us say we have no interest in being involved in all this labour. We could pay DEV.to to provision these servers and keep them up to date with the latest codebase.
As more companies want their own DEV.to-like communities they might have specific features they'd like. These features may not be core to what DEV.to would want for their platform. These feature-requests could be turned into plugins (like WordPress) and companies can purchase them.
Another business model is how to manage and grow a community (not from a technical perspective.) They could provide training in the form of webinars, videos or 1-on-1 time or consultancy on strategy.
TL;DR
So for those looking for the TL;DR I believe this is what Ben is saying:
P.S. I saw no CTO title. Did you leave that title vacant for me? π
Yup, that sums it up. And to be clear, these have always been our titles, we just didn't have them listed everywhere. Jess's role in the comp committee is new.
And to add to the business model stuff, we'll continue the on-site monetization in the various ways we're already doing so, like sponsors, listings, and new stuff to come, but that's not what we're looking to max out. To us, making open source our core business model is the healthiest approach and the one where we can deliver the most net good with our time and energy. We also have learned through the past couple years of experience that this is be a great market to be in.
Can you explain what that means? It sounds like itβs good for the community but not necessarily for the long-term financial viability of the company.
To help clarify questions of Axel and Mike:
Let us say ExamPro wanted to run their own version of DEV.to that is focused around Cloud Computing instead of Developers. Since the DEV.to platform is open-source so we can pull the DEV.to repo, provision the servers and maintain the running servers.
Let us say we have no interest in being involved in all this labour. We could pay DEV.to to provision these servers and keep them up to date with the latest codebase.
As more companies want their own DEV.to-like communities they might have specific features they'd like. These features may not be core to what DEV.to would want for their platform. These feature-requests could be turned into plugins (like WordPress) and companies can purchase them.
Another business model is how to manage and grow a community (not from a technical perspective.) They could provide training in the form of webinars, videos or 1-on-1 time or consultancy on strategy.
I don't understand what this means either.
Think gitlab, redis, elasticsearch, docker and probably 100s of more im not aware of.
They are open source. You can use them for free. They make good buck from people who have bigger needs.