Yep we find a variant of this with our python open source data science users who normal businesses would hate:
- Across all Python envs (Jupyter, streamlit/plotly, flask/Django, ...), they report way more bugs, and often from our free tiers, which sounds low ROI.. but our community caught all but ~2 significant bugs we fixed this year that our internal automated testing missed and would have otherwise gone to our Enterprise and gov users . They are happy to exchange a tiny bit of GPU or viz burps for new features faster, as long as we are responsive to their reports! That also pushed us to a better dev cadence which wouldn't have worked for our Enterprise users. More subtle, we have more confidence for deploying wider features/APIs which would otherwise be too underused + risky for the same reason.
- they are often doing innovative new things with our stack, which originally meant feature requests for non-repeatable sales.. but ended up stretching our flexibility into wider applicability, and they can clearly tell us areas to advance the visual, analytic, etc sides of our R&D and package it up for the rest of their internal analysts. Almost like a multiplier for conversations with our more operationally focused no-code/low-code users, and helps us see around the corner for them in the AI+API+customization sides!
- most of our technical partnership discussions now go through our OSS client repos. Rather than PowerPoints with BD people that don't have staff to do things, a product dev or sales engineer/architect or devrel blogger will think, "oh our customers would benefit from better interactive visuals on our data, let me whip something up quick with that package" and we help them take it from there
- open source data users like PyData developers and data scientists, compared to say the # of SMBs out there or general enterprise employees, is small and almost by definition doesn't pay for most software... but they end up being attached to projects that do, and influence much of their organization that definitely does!
We're just used contributing bug reports and pull requests, sort of our thing. It's not as prevalent with Windows or MacOS users, just not part of that culture.
- Across all Python envs (Jupyter, streamlit/plotly, flask/Django, ...), they report way more bugs, and often from our free tiers, which sounds low ROI.. but our community caught all but ~2 significant bugs we fixed this year that our internal automated testing missed and would have otherwise gone to our Enterprise and gov users . They are happy to exchange a tiny bit of GPU or viz burps for new features faster, as long as we are responsive to their reports! That also pushed us to a better dev cadence which wouldn't have worked for our Enterprise users. More subtle, we have more confidence for deploying wider features/APIs which would otherwise be too underused + risky for the same reason.
- they are often doing innovative new things with our stack, which originally meant feature requests for non-repeatable sales.. but ended up stretching our flexibility into wider applicability, and they can clearly tell us areas to advance the visual, analytic, etc sides of our R&D and package it up for the rest of their internal analysts. Almost like a multiplier for conversations with our more operationally focused no-code/low-code users, and helps us see around the corner for them in the AI+API+customization sides!
- most of our technical partnership discussions now go through our OSS client repos. Rather than PowerPoints with BD people that don't have staff to do things, a product dev or sales engineer/architect or devrel blogger will think, "oh our customers would benefit from better interactive visuals on our data, let me whip something up quick with that package" and we help them take it from there
- open source data users like PyData developers and data scientists, compared to say the # of SMBs out there or general enterprise employees, is small and almost by definition doesn't pay for most software... but they end up being attached to projects that do, and influence much of their organization that definitely does!