As buying power shifts to individual developers to be successful we have to win the hearts and minds of developers. Developers are our primary users and making them happy and seeing the value in Gitpod will be key to convincing buyers as well.
To make Gitpod as easily accessible as possible for everyone writing code, we have developed Gitpod in the open and offer a generous free SaaS offering.
We will continuously track and benchmark ourselves against:
We aim to be the best-of-breed tool when it comes to CDEs. This means integrating well with existing tools and setups. We empower developers to reuse existing technology and knowledge while using Gitpod. We want Gitpod to feel blazingly fast and clean to use.
Gitpod shall have a style and feel that developers deeply love and appreciate. This is about values, attitude, and design. We ‣ with a simple orthogonal product design, that builds upon solutions developed by the wider community and avoids hairy, complex design decisions. Next to our brand, visual design, and in-product experience, this focus also applies to documentation and building out our community.
We want to take developers by the hand to show them experience Gitpod’s value, explaining relevant features, interacting with them at the right moment, sending them small nudges when it makes sense. We want to have a data-driven understanding of adoption within the product and the wider community.
Due to the orthogonality of Gitpod, integrating and partnering with other technology companies are crucial. Any third-party developer products from where people might want to start writing code are important partnership targets. Examples are JetBrains, GitLab and GitHub. That is all products to which we are downstream when thinking about developer flows. Furthermore, developer-focused products which are downstream to us (more common, as we are very early in the pipeline), such as developer frameworks or APIs as they benefit largely from Gitpod with easy onboarding exposing our solution to more developers.
Unlike other open-source companies, we benefit from having started with the hard part: SaaS. To reach PMF with developers SaaS provides us with the necessary insights and fast turnaround times required to quickly iterate on the product. As the whole market shifts towards cloud offerings, SaaS offers us a lower-cost, self-serve/product-led channel that is more capital efficient (lower customer acquisition and support costs).