Open Company: Fifth Month Metrics Building an Open Source Startup

Fifth month metrics for Watermelon

• North Star Metric
• Monthly Active Users 160 ⬆️ (prev 111)
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• Engagement
• Number of people who activated Watermelon: 211 ⬇️ (prev 216)
• Conversion from opened to active user: 76% ⬆️(prev 52%)
• People who used us 12+ days this month: 58 ⬆️(prev 30)
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• Acquisition
• New Users 77 ⬇️ (prev 201)
• New GH Stars 10 ⬆️ (prev 7)
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• Accumulated
• Accumulated total unique users: 579 (prev 504)
• Accumulated total downloads: 3200 (prev 2300)
• Accumulated total GitHub stars: 277 (prev 267)
• Accumulated total contributors: 21 (prev 20)

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A month ago on our previous update we announced that we started the month by going into fundraising mode. We also mentioned that we were working on inline code comments and on cleaning up our codebase.

Although we did spend time fundraising our other priorities changed. 
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Reorganizing our UI

We’re focused on listening to those users who repeatedly use our product. These people all shared a complaint about our product. We were showing way too much information on our sidebar UI. It was overwhelming. 

We fixed this on our latest release. Our vision has always been “centralize all technical knowledge in a single UI”. Watermelon’s new version now shows you the latest commit message and PR for a given line or block of code. 

And coming soon, the most relevant ticket. 

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Get the most relevant ticket

If you are a software developer, you know that relevant information exists out there on a company’s ticketing system. You’ve probably found yourself not understanding something about a piece of code. Running git blame or going to GitHub to see which commits associate with it. Reading which Jira tickets have to do with the change. Finally going to Jira to understand something about the business logic of that piece of code. 

Right now we’re working on automating this flow. The same way we’re bringing the most relevant commit message and pull request, we’re gonna bring to you the most relevant Jira ticket. This way, besides understanding code history, you will understand the code’s business logic. All without leaving the VS Code UI. 

We’re developing this Jira integration on our closed source. This will be our first paid functionality. Right now we’re having conversations with a few companies to provide them as much value as possible.

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Raising money during turbulent times

As mentioned in the previous post we had a demo day. 

We’re living turbulent times. You’ve seen it on the news, on Twitter, etc. “We entered a recession.” “VC funding winter”. “Massive layoffs in the tech industry.”

Despite that, we added awesome people with great technical backgrounds to our cap table. Stay tuned. We’ll provide more details about this in next month’s blog post. 

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What’s next

• The Jira integration and talking to those who will be the first users, will be our priority this month. 
• Spend the last days fundraising. Then get back to work 100% on our product, getting traction, and talking to users and potential customers. 

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