Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Stack Overflow used public usage data to identify enterprise sales targets

Prashanth Chandrasekar · How Stack Overflow Secretly Made $65,000,000 on its SaaS Last Year · Jul 18, 2024 · at 8:22

Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar explains the community-led growth motion used to transition corporate users from the free public site to paid private enterprise instances.

0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 39.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“In the context of, like, post customer one and two, I think at that point we started saying, okay, let's actually think about every possible customer that is using Stack Overflow, so we actually had that very specific list of the largest users company-wise, and we go, typically went into companies and we said, you know, you've got 2000 users using Stack Overflow, And by the way, here are all the tags that they're using. They're using Python. They're looking up content on Python. They're looking up content on PHP. And by the way, here's why you should think about having an enterprise license with us. So it was very much a bottoms up, tops down, similar to a PLG motion, but this is more of a community-led motion, if you will, or CLG sort of motion that we went after.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Prashanth Chandrasekar

Assertion Partly supported
Survey: 70% of developers want AI tools, but only 40% trust them
“When we went and did a bunch of, ah, surveys, ah, in our user base, a 100,000 people responded and said, you know, 70% of them wanted to use AI tools for software development or for something related to technology development, but only 40% of them trusted what…”
Prashanth Chandrasekar Jul 18, 2024 ▶ 18:58 How Stack Overflow Secretly Made $65,000,000 on its SaaS Last Year
Assertion Supported
Stack Overflow for Teams reached 15,000 customers, starting with Microsoft
“Microsoft was customer number one, and then we went from enterprise down to where we are today, which we've now got 15,000 Customers leveraging Stack Overflow for the teams.”
Prashanth Chandrasekar Jul 18, 2024 ▶ 2:15 How Stack Overflow Secretly Made $65,000,000 on its SaaS Last Year
Assertion Partly supported
Stack Overflow went from zero to 70% recurring revenue since 2018
“So over 60% we have about, probably close to now 70% of our company's revenues are recurring, and they were actually non-recur, they were not recurring revenues when I started in 2018.”
Prashanth Chandrasekar Jul 18, 2024 ▶ 3:54 How Stack Overflow Secretly Made $65,000,000 on its SaaS Last Year
Disclosure
Google Gemini attributes and links to Stack Overflow contributors via API
“We launched this program called Overflow API, and the first company that basically engaged with us is, ah, Google, and so now all Stack Overflow content, when used within Gemini's AI capability, will show up in their AI tools with links to Stack Overflow back …”
Prashanth Chandrasekar Jul 18, 2024 ▶ 20:47 How Stack Overflow Secretly Made $65,000,000 on its SaaS Last Year
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Stack Overflow for Teams charges $18–$19 monthly per enterprise seat
“They pay, I won't say specifically Microsoft, but generally speaking, it has multiple tiers, so the enterprise tier is anywhere, it's close to about 18, 19 dollars or so per seat per month,”
Prashanth Chandrasekar Jul 18, 2024 ▶ 2:39 How Stack Overflow Secretly Made $65,000,000 on its SaaS Last Year
Assertion Supported
Stack Overflow generates more than $100 million in annual revenue
“It's certainly over a hundred million.”
Prashanth Chandrasekar Jul 18, 2024 ▶ 3:41 How Stack Overflow Secretly Made $65,000,000 on its SaaS Last Year
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 2,600 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.