GitHub: Motivated By Recognition, Not Money? – with Tom Preston-Werner

Tom Preston Werner, GitHub, Bootstrapping, Customer Acquisition, SaaS (software as a service)

How do you bootstrap a profitable company and get nearly a million developers to sign up? You’re about to meet a founder who says he did it by not caring about money.

Joining me is Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub, a site that enables developers to collaborate on code. GitHub is growing and attracting developers quickly, with well over $1M in annual revenue.

Tom Preston Werner

GitHub

Tom Preston-Werner is the cofounder of GitHub, a site that enables developers to collaborate on code.

 

Andrew: Before we’ve get started, tell me if you have this problem. You’ve got a great product, but you’re not getting people to even try it, let alone buy it. Well, the problem is probably that you’ve got too much text on your site. But check out what these startups have done. Here’s SnapEngage, they’ve got a video explaining their product right underneath the free trial button. Here is, SendGrid, right next to the get started button is a video explaining the product. Video, much more than text helps people understand what you’ve created and convinces them to try it and buy it.

And the company I recommend that you turn to for this, it’s Revolution Productions, the same company that did both those startups’ and many other videos. Revolution-Productions, and when you go to their site, revolutions-productions.com, and contact them, I want you to talk directly to the founder, Anish Patel. I want you to tell him I sent...

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