Reviewing 2016, Previewing 2017
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Year-end reviews, and year-beginning previews, offer us an opportunity for sober reflection on the three fundamental questions of any cooperative, rational human endeavor: What do we know? What should we do? What can we hope?
I’ve written already about raising first institutional capital in 2016. That post is background for this one.
We made significant progress in Stardog qua product in 2016. Let’s review.
In January:
By December:
In between January and December:
These statistics don’t include anything that was started in 2016 but hasn’t yet been merged, including outstanding branches on memory management, cluster, and core server rewrite. There’s some chance they would move our total code for the year from positive to deficit, which we would clearly prefer.
In other words, we only increased the Stardog codebase by about 35,000 lines, most but not all of which is code. That includes some non-trivial highlights:
As of this blog post, the Stardog codebase is about 575,000 lines of code, a number that’s been reasonably fixed for the past few years, while we’ve added significant new user-facing capability to the system.
Okay, how did we do that? Seven new engineering hires, who collectively raise the sheer amount of engineering awesome around Stardog to new heights:
These great developers join an engineering team and technical staff of which I could not be more proud:
We also made big progress on the revenue side of the business. We moved from perpetual licensing to annual subscription model in early 2016 and that transition went much more smoothly than I could have guessed.
While it is somewhat artificial, given the new baseline, our MRR increased by about 4,500% this year. Two hires on the sales team were key here:
We’re working on improving Stardog every day. From a software engineering perspective, we intend to return to the previous release pace, which was our historic norm, of about 2 releases per month.
From a product management perspective, we are working on improving the user experience and the power of Stardog by focusing on
We will also be experimenting with our go-to market strategy. Maybe 30-day evaluations should be 45-day evaluations. What is the right mix of features for Stardog Developer, Enterprise, and Community? Should we have a non-commercial variant? We need to be very deliberate this year about finding an increasingly more efficient set of strategies and processes around how people evaluate and learn Stardog.
We’re making more new hires this year including another East Coast sales rep, as well as two front-end engineers to focus on Magnetar. Please get in touch if you are interested.
To date, we’ve never spent a penny on marketing, advertising, etc. I don’t say that to brag, because it’s surely nothing to brag about. I say it because, first, it’s true and, second, it’s interesting. All of our revenue growth to date has been organic, inbound growth.
The goal in 2017 is twofold: to increase organic, inbound growth dramatically by actively marketing Stardog as the solution to enterprise data unification; and to learn how to tell the Stardog story in an outbound sales process that complements our organic growth.
What do we know? We improve Stardog every day, both as a product and as a business, and we can attribute that growth to three facts:
What should we do? Insist on excellence from ourselves and help to elicit it from others, too. Improve the product and the user experience every single day. No zero days here. Kaizen forever, my people!
What can we hope? That markets are rational? Hmm, no, scratch that. We can hope for more good breaks than bad and that political instability around the globe diminishes instead of increases. And we can hope for opportunities every day to tell people the Stardog story.
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