Creating a growth-driving community with dbt Labs’ Tristan Handy
This week on How to Win: Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs, an open source data transformation tool that allows data teams to quickly produce trusted data sets. Founded in 2016, dbt Labs has grown from a small consulting service to a SaaS product company now valued at $4.2 billion with a thriving Slack community of over 25 000 members. In this episode, Tristan explains how dbt found so much success through community-led growth and the challenges and opportunities to be found with an open source model. I share my thoughts on how to successfully transition from a consulting service to a SaaS business, and different ways to think about monetizing open source models.
Key Points:
- How dbt got its start as a consulting service (01:04)
- Four key factors in a successful transition from consulting service to SaaS company (03:37)
- Tristan explains why the services team at dbt remains strategic (08:55)
- dbt's three main sales motions (10:00)
- How dbt's massive Slack community aids their growth (10:53)
- My thoughts on creating a successful community with a quote from Lemlist's Guillaume Moubeche (11:38)
- Tristan explains dbt's unusual relationship with their competition (14:48)
- dbt's open source business model (16:50)
- I talk about what you need to consider with an open source business model, with a quote from Cloudera's founder, Mike Olsen (17:34)
- Why Tristan believes community driven companies must be advancing the conversation in their field to succeed (21:17)
- Tristan explains dbt Labs' marketing efforts (22:49)
- dbt's approach to meet-ups and conferences (23:27)
- I explain what I see as the true value of meet-ups and conferences with a quote from Drift's David Cancel (24:30)
- Creating trust at scale (26:45)
- Wrap up (28:10)
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