There’s a new episode of The Business of Open Source today! It’s been a while.
I talked with Anais Concepcion about a program she’s been testing at Grist to give free activation codes for the enterprise version of Grist to individuals and small businesses that have a revenue under $1 million. The program has been in place for 5 months, and Anais came on the show to talk about both the strategy behind the program as well as some preliminary results.
The strategy comes down to shifting the perception of Grist Open Source and Grist Enterprise. The goal, Anais says, is to make the ecosystem consider Grist Enterprise the ‘default’ version of Grist, rather than the other way around. In fact, she’s considering renaming Grist Enterprise to just “Grist” to reinforce the idea that it is not the ‘special’ version of Grist, but the default version.
There were other strategic goals, too. One is to get more feedback on the ‘enterprise’ features, another is to avoid nickel-and-diming individual users while making sure that big companies are paying.
The results so far have been interesting. The biggest concrete result has been in partnership relationships; it’s easier for small consulting / development shops to get access to the full Grist and to then resell it to their clients. There haven’t been been any signed deals yet as a result of this dynamic, but there are companies in discussions with the Grist sales team that probably wouldn’t have happened without the program… it will be interesting to see what happens as the program matures.
After we turned off the recording, we had an interesting discussion about pricing as well; at Open Source Founders Summit Anais is going to do a workshop on pricing strategy. Not how much to charge, but what to charge for (consumption, seats, etc), how to set pricing anchors, and more. Join us in May if that’s interesting to you!
