Being an Open Company: Third Month Metrics for Watermelon

Second month metrics for Watermelon

• Monthly Active Users 28 ⬆️ (prev 10)
• New Users 169 ⬆️ (prev 39)
• New GH Stars 165 ⬆️ (prev 30)
• Accumulated total unique users: 303 (prev 134)
• Accumulated total downloads: 1200 (prev not measured with discipline)
• Accumulated total GitHub stars: 256 (prev 91)
• Accumulated total contributors: 19 (prev 19)

Three months ago we were a pair of hackers with just an idea. With the dream to onboard developers to new codebases 10x faster. 

Three months later we have a stable product, unknown people from renowned companies using our product various times per week, and a successful Show HN launch under our belt. 

Learning from users at scale
We launched on Show HN as a pair of hackers looking for feedback. We learned a lot in a couple of hours. 

We pasted a link to Watermelon’s GitHub repository. We learned very interesting things such as:

• We were not handling the case where people cloned their repo via SSH
• We were not using the best Telemetry system possible 
• We were pulling info from unrelated repos on some private repos 
• A lot of people have a hard time running Watermelon. Both because the sidebar is visually ignored, and because we have 3 steps to run. 

A lot of this has already been fixed. 

The main problem we’re working on solving right now is that we’re taking too long to show value. We need to show value to developers in a single step, without making them think, in a way that’s more embedded to their already existing workflow. 

Right now we’re working on showing you value on hovering lines of code. Stay tuned. 

This launch is also making our graphs look very nice. 

WAU/MAU ratio as our engagement metric

Sequoia has a very good blog post about selecting the right user metric.

From what we’ve seen until the moment, our most engaged developers use Watermelon 3 times a week at most. Because of this, we’ll focus on the WAU/MAU ratio as our engagement metric. As time goes on we’ll also look at the DAU/MAU ratio. 

Our goal is to hit a 60% WAU/MAU ratio to be classified as a weekly usage product. We’ll build the first report for this metric next month. Netflix, YouTube, Amazon and Walmart are products that focus more on weekly usage VS daily. We’re in this category.

Setting up our Open Core business model
Short term we are focused on qualitative and quantitative feedback to build the most sticky product possible. Long-term, we wanna become the best company in the world at making engineering teams collaborate better. This implies making revenue. 

With our open core business model we’ll maintain two repos: Our community edition which is the one you already know and love, and a private one which has the same code as the open one but with additional features. These features are a mixture of unlimited usage and functionalities tailored towards engineering managers. 

We are already in conversations with various engineering managers and CTOs to achieve this. We’ll invest more time on this after Q2. However, we wanna understand the compliance needs these managers have, what metric(s) they want to improve with a solution like ours, and how the buying process looks like from now. 

Traction Experiments

• Blog posts and YouTube videos keep correlating with new users installing. Some blog posts do with new GitHub stars as well. 
• Show HN was a game changer for us
• Emailing our stargazers asking them to join our Slack community didn’t work. Perhaps Slack isn’t the right place to have a community? That’s something we’re asking ourselves right now. 

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What’s Next

• Aggressively focus on distribution this month. More blog posts, more videos, and more outreach; while the VS Code marketplace helps us. 
• Get into the terrain of “get the most relevant piece of documentation without leaving VS Code”
• Start focusing on fundraising at the end of the month. We’re getting inbound investor interest. We’re pushing meetings to the start of July right now. We wanna keep our focus on building, talking to users, and distributing the product to new developers. 

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