Lenny's Podcast · Jul 13M&A, competition, pricing, and investing | Julia Schottenstein (dbt Labs)
20,000 companies use dbt every week, and dbt Cloud serves 8,000 companies with 10 million runs per month. It grew through open source and simplicity, ran its first pricing change last year, and charges a small fraction of the 20 to 35% of warehouse spend customers say dbt is worth.
Tips
- Set a competition philosophy: hold your vision, grow the pie, lean into strengths▶ 18:26
- Split open source from paid by state and cross-team collaboration▶ 29:56dbt Cloud mostly loses deals to dbt open source, and the team is happy to lose to itself.
- Start willingness-to-pay conversations before you build the product▶ 32:50Customers value dbt at 20 to 35% of their cloud data warehouse spend, and dbt charges a small fraction of that by design.
- Ask four price-point questions to uncover willingness to pay▶ 36:06dbt Labs talked to dozens of customers before its first pricing change.
- Ship good enough and accept tech debt as a sign of success▶ 53:20The scheduler now serves 8,000 companies and manages 10 million runs per month.
- Spend time hands-on with customer problems before scaling a product▶ 26:10dbt later reached 20,000 companies using it every week.
- Use open source and simplicity to get low-friction distribution and a flywheel▶ 22:1020,000 companies use dbt every week.
- Read product-market fit from users who cannot stop talking about it▶ 11:37
- Run a physical exercise so the whole team owns a new algorithm▶ 28:00The shift moved dbt from running DAGs in an imperative way to a declarative way.
- Have your whole company use your own product and join the community▶ 51:45More than 30% of dbt Labs headcount has contributed to its data transformation workflow, and the Slack community has 50,000 members.
- Single thread the team on one main priority▶ 58:44
