Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB, explains the commercial challenges of monetizing MongoDB's open-source database before the cloud product Atlas was introduced.
“Where our revenue really came from was only in the top segment of the market. And the reason I bring this up is MongoDB is adoption and product market fit for our free technology. Serves the entire market, every segment, every vertical, you know, almost every country in the world in terms of the data we have around where it's being used. But in terms of monetization and revenue, we were largely concentrated in large enterprise because the proprietary features we had to build around the database that customers were paid for were naturally a fit for large companies, regulated companies and less so for, you know, mid market and SMB businesses.”
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More from Sahir Azam
Insight
Azam: Consumption models disrupt subscriptions just as subscriptions disrupted perpetual licenses
“A consumption based cloud business is as different from a subscription software business, which is kind of our transition. As 10 years ago, perpetual software was to subscription. You know, it's that fundamental of a difference in terms of the economics and cu…”
Sahir AzamJan 8, 2021▶ 25:30How Sales and Product Really Should Work Together with MongoDB | SaaStr Software Community
AssertionSupported
Azam: MongoDB took 10 years to hit $100M ARR, four for $500M
“Took us about a hundred to get to a hundred million took our company about 10 years, you know, and granted, there was a lot of adoption that needed to happen there, you know, a lot of early development of our technology. So it's not a perfect apples to apples …”
Sahir AzamJan 8, 2021▶ 28:07How Sales and Product Really Should Work Together with MongoDB | SaaStr Software Community
Opinion
Azam: SaaS Is the Most Powerful Way to Monetize Open Source
“SAS is the most powerful way to monetize open source”
Sahir AzamJan 8, 2021▶ 29:00How Sales and Product Really Should Work Together with MongoDB | SaaStr Software Community
Insight
Azam: MongoDB Historically Under-Monetized by Selling Only at Production Phase
“We have sort of two vectors where we were effectively under monetizing our total value to customers. One was this concentration of product market fit for our proprietary technology at the top of the market. The other was, if you kind of plotted out the app lif…”
Sahir AzamJan 8, 2021▶ 8:28How Sales and Product Really Should Work Together with MongoDB | SaaStr Software Community
AssertionSupported
Azam: MongoDB had zero self-service revenue before its SaaS pivot
“And we had effectively zero self-service business. We didn't have a product that developers could come onto in a B to C like model, swipe a credit card and start consuming and a pay as you go model.”
Sahir AzamJan 8, 2021▶ 11:00How Sales and Product Really Should Work Together with MongoDB | SaaStr Software Community
AssertionSupported
Azam: MongoDB cloud business accounts for 47% of total company revenue
“We had our earnings call last night, you know, our cloud business is growing over. You know, year over year, it's now 47% of our total company revenue.”
Sahir AzamJan 8, 2021▶ 27:01How Sales and Product Really Should Work Together with MongoDB | SaaStr Software Community
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