Insight
Desai: Product managers must reject bespoke features, even for $10M deals
“The art of saying no is the best thing a product manager can do to actually eventually win in a product, right? Because you, typically have like one company. You're basically jamming their features. Oh, I'm paying you ten million dollars. You've got to do this…”
Insight
Desai: DevTools companies cannot succeed by packaging mediocre products
“Means if you take a VMware or any other enterprise company, they package it up. It's all good enough. We'll be number two, number three. Distribution, ELAs, life is good whether it gets used or not. Can't afford to do that. If you are in the developer land, I …”
Insight
Desai: You cannot sell to developers, only show up the right way
“You don't sell to developers. You know what I mean? Like there's no selling to developers. You have to just show up in the right way.”
Insight
Desai: Software leaders should focus on packaging rather than pricing
“Pricing and packaging is a art. You don't delegate that to an external agency, but you've got to have a sense of intuition of what the market bears, what the customer's thinking and doing the research. That's my one recommendation is think deeply about packagi…”
Insight
Desai: The 2020s is the decade of data and developers
“This is the decade for data and developers, the one we are in. The prior decade was cloud and SaaS, and the one before that was software-defined everything.”
Insight
Desai: External CEOs must preserve founder intensity for long-lasting success
“I'm a big proponent that even as companies transition out, and I know some of the founders get tired, but how do you preserve their first principle thinking, the value thinking, the intensity of how they thought about the first product and where it could go? I…”
Insight
Desai: Software packaging works best when the lowest tier delivers strong value
“So this general idea of, can your lowest package deliver the best value, right, at the right price point? And then you layer in additional functionality to create like a three tier package, which now everybody talks about, Hey, you offer small, medium, large, …”
Insight
Desai: Multi-product companies should sell committed dollar pools instead of individual SKUs
“As you go to multi-product, instead of trying to sell skew by skew by skew, death by skews, you could just say, Committing a certain amount of dollars, which is called Cloud Commit Now and everything else, right? But this idea that you're committing a pool of …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Desai: Product marketing initially owned pricing and packaging at VMware
“Pricing and packaging was done by product marketing at VMware initially. Everyone was technical. They understood the product. They could actually You know, demo and sell the product, which helps. Some of the same principles we're using now at Sentry which is y…”
Insight
Desai: External developers won't adopt your devtool if internal developers won't
“It starts in-house with our own developers. Are you going to use it? Are you using it? If you're not going to use it, why the hell do you think some other developer at another company is going to use Sentry for solving that scenario.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Desai: Sentry grew from $20M to over $100M ARR in 2023
“From around 20 odd million to now north of a hundred, which we crossed last year during this period of time.”
Assertion Partly supported
Desai: Sentry SaaS and open source have zero feature delta
“Number one, the software, a SaaS offering is exactly the same as the open source offering. There's no feature delta. So as a company, you can run the fully functional, up-to-the-minute value of Sentry on your own without paying us anything.”
Insight
Desai: Companies using open source must allocate money or code back
“If you're a company using open source, you better allocate some hard dollars or you're allocating time or code back. You got to give back. You can't just be taking.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Desai: Sentry has surpassed 100,000 SaaS organizations
“We've just crossed a 100,000 SaaS orgs because of the sustained kind of commitment to building a great product, being in the community, making sure access is easy, and then participating in the community.”
Disclosure
Desai: Sentry underpriced Session Replay to drive broad developer adoption
“There was art from pricing and packaging prior art, which is, it's X dollars, and we're like, Now, for the way we operate, we don't want to be at X dollars. We're going to basically focus on adoption. It helps kind of solve this problem, which is our core mark…”
Insight
Desai: Secondary products must win standalone to achieve outsized outcomes
“When you are trying to be a large, sustainable, long-term company, you have to go after new, net new opportunities. They have to be adjacent though, so they can't be completely disconnected. So the way we said it is, this needs to be able to win as a standalon…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Desai: Sentry's second product reached double-digit millions in 18 months
“What we had built initially was successful. Double digit millions in like 18 months. It was growing thousands of customers and everything else.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Desai: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger always responds to emails
“If I send Pat Gelsinger, who's now the CEO of Intel, he will respond. He has the time to sometimes, you know, it takes a little bit, but he will respond. People who are not as busy or, you know, I don't want to say like not as important or whatever it is, but …”
Milin Desai