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Discussion on: I'm Jon Roes, engineering lead at Streamlit, ask me anything!

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Deepak Prabhakara

Hi Jon, congratulations to the team and you on the acquisition.

My question is two-fold. Could you please shed some light on your early go-to-market strategy and how your developer experience evolved with the product. Especially any lessons on what worked and didn't work would be helpful.

Regards.
Deepak.

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Jon Roes

Thank you!

The story is probably not going to be surprising and will sound cliche. As I understand it, we scratched our own itch with the open source python library, and then we talked to our users, especially the ones using streamlit at work. One of the questions that was coming up the most was β€œwe don’t want to have to run this thing ourselves, can’t you do it?” β€” so we did.

Over time, what we found is that data scientists were huge fans of our tool, and were pleading with their managers to pay for our service. Then came all the hurdles you can imagine when going through a purchasing process at a company - security, risk management, pricing. I would advise not underestimating security as a hurdle to adoption, and would recommend prioritizing work that makes your product something that security teams will want say β€œyes” to.

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Deepak Prabhakara

Thanks Jon, that isn't cliche at all. Solving an unmet need and listening to customers, love it!

You bring up a great point about the hurdles to get enterprise-ready and prioritizing security, thanks.