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HashiCorp is a business with community in its DNA. Many companies with a community claim to be community-led, but few truly are. That's not the case for HashiCorp. Community isn't a bolt-on tactic - it has always been a core part of their approach and has shaped the business it is today. Everything from their products' architecture and monetization plans to their go-to-market and sales strategy has been influenced by community.
Community will also play a critical role in its future, too. A recent, controversial licensing change puts all of these efforts at stake.
This deep dive looks into the specifics of HashiCorp's go-to-community approach, detailing how they create value for their product community members, the impact it has had on their business, and the lessons and missteps that you can learn from.
This is an interesting one. Let's dive in 🐬
HashiCorp is a cloud infrastructure company. They've created a suite of tools that help companies to manage cloud applications (Terraform, Packer), keep the business and their data secure (Boundary, Vault), handle networking on a granular level (Consul), and deal with orchestration and cross-platform deployment (Nomad, Waypoint) [8]. All of their tools are built as open source projects, with a large community of users, contributors, and partners collaborating on development. The company makes money by selling premium versions of some of those projects with features enterprises require, as well as licensing, support, governance, professional, and managed services, and they have a SaaS offering, too. As of their Q1 results this year, they had annual revenues of $660M, up 44% from the previous year, beating their own guidance and showing a significant demand trajectory [27]. This impressive growth is backed by an expanding customer base that's now over 4,300 customers, of which 830 pay $100,000 or greater annually [23]. At IPO in December 2021, they had a market capitalization of over $15B, making them one of the largest commercial open source companies in the world [36]. But, as is often the case, it all started with someone building something to scratch their own itch.
For HashiCorp, that someone is co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto. In 2009, he began working on Vagrant as an open-source side project, coding during nights and weekends around his full-time software development job. HashiCorp’s open source products have now been downloaded more than 250M times [35], but this was no overnight success. In the entire first year, there were around 500 total downloads [2]. Yet, Mitchell was undeterred—it solved a problem he had, and so he continued to plug away at it. Over the next two years, it grew to over a million downloads a year, and along the way he built and started charging for a VMWare integration that brought in around $400k-500k a year. This commercial success was unexpected and forced the question of whether or not to build a company around the project. In the end, they went the VC route, and alongside college friend and co-founder Armon Dadgar, they founded HashiCorp in 2012 [3].
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The first few years for HashiCorp were almost exclusively about open source product development and evangelism to grow awareness of the tools [4]. It was slow going, articulating the problem their products solved and how their solutions worked proved to be a difficult task. They found it most effective to show people how it worked in person, and so the founders set about doing just that—initially at local meetups and then going from conference to conference to give talks and explain their open-source projects to developers [39].
"It was just me and Armon flying around dozens of times a year, dozens of conferences a year, getting directly to the user and giving talks about this stuff. And one of the benefits about open source is you could do that authentically because you're not doing a sales pitch. You're just pitching something that you think is a good idea and is totally free."
HashiCorp has a strong belief in Developer Advocacy. Critical early contributions by Nic Jackson and Anubhav Mishra, among others, involved creating highly technical demos, as well as educational materials, like blog posts, video tutorials, conference talks, and training. HashiCorp also did a lot to support open source generally, including sponsoring conferences, open source contributors and projects, as well as hiring contributors to work at HashiCorp full-time [19]. This evangelism helped to change the slope of the growth curve, as Mitchell recalls [25]: "We reached our first 1,000 community members well before a company ever existed, probably sometime in 2010 or 2011... My primary means of reaching these users was local meetup groups and word of mouth.”
Another compounding factor was direct engagement with the burgeoning community forming around their products [4]. The main channels used at this time were GitHub, where people were submitting pull requests or opening issues. As well as Google Groups for announcements and discussion, and Twitter for promoting updates and changes. They scaled their engagement on these channels by documenting exactly how their whole team should communicate. They produced a writing style guide that everyone interacting with their community needed to use, which explained how they should engage with people, and the type of language to use [5]. It was a true team effort - the founders have personally spent thousands of hours engaging with the community, from getting on planes to meet users or talk at conferences to responding to conversations and making themselves accessible to community members [4]. This continued post-IPO, too, over a decade later [5, 39] :
"I still personally respond to stuff on Reddit and Hacker News and things like that. And I enjoy it. I mean, I think I couldn't let that go because it's such a strong signal to me of how the products are doing because that's the user, right? That's the person using it."
The goal of this community engagement was to build their Minimum Viable Audience and reach a tipping point at which there was enough momentum to sustain that audience without the company driving it themselves. For HashiCorp, this was at around 30,000 to 40,000 people, but once they got there, all of a sudden, people started contributing without encouragement [20]. As Jana Iris, HashiCorp employee #10 and first female hire, notes [32]: "Once you get that peer-to-peer validation and peer-to-peer sharing, that's when you really see traction take off."
What started as a founder-led thing became formalized into a comprehensive Developer Relations function. This overarching function breaks out into events, education, and community teams. It sits inside marketing and is well resourced with around 35% of the total marketing headcount [1]. For some, that might seem like a lot, but it’s part of a complete corporate strategy that culminates in the creation of an efficient revenue-generating machine.
Behind HashiCorp's success is a confluence of trends, including digital transformation, cloud adoption, and multi-cloud. The way organizations manage the applications their employees use, and the services they provide to their customers, has changed. From CD-ROMs installed on individual computers to stacks of servers running applications organization-wide, and now into the Cloud.
As the shift to the Cloud has matured, organizations are increasingly seeing the need for a multi-cloud setup. That is a mixture of both private, self-hosted clouds, and the use of public clouds, like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. HashiCorp provides the infrastructure to support any application in a multi-cloud setup. This is a generational opportunity, a one-time huge shift to cloud, and HashiCorp is right in the midst of it all, selling shovels in the gold rush [22].
Perhaps giving away shovels might be more accurate. After all, it's HashiCorp's free, open source tools that are the entry point for most of their prospective customers. A developer will have a specific problem and will look around for a solution. This is very much a tactical, ad-hoc decision - they're seeking the best tool for the job at hand. The widespread use of HashiCorp's open source products has made it the go-to solution in their space. What's more, since they're free, and open source, they avoid much of the procurement overhead that would bog down teams if they looked at a commercial solution from the get-go. Over time, other developers in different parts of their engineering division are making similar choices, and pretty soon this creates a problem for the organization in terms of operational overhead, networking complexity, and security. So the engineering platform team step in to industrialize their setup, and solve their issues with a common infrastructure, buying into HashiCorp's product suite.
HashiCorp decided to focus on the Enterprise early on, at least in part, due to consideration of the community. Their Enterprise focus means they have been able to monetize their offerings not on the scope of their products but on scale.
"No one minds paying for things like team collaboration features, SSO, all of the enterprise capabilities to get you over things like compliance and governance hurdles," explains CMO Marc Holmes [1].
The result is a clear division between their free and paid-for offerings, helping them to avoid a common tripping point many other open source offerings run into when seeking to monetize.
HashiCorp uses a hybrid approach, combining bottom-up product-led growth (PLG), with a top-down Enterprise sales motion. They lead with Developer Relations to drive open source adoption, before later adding in corporate marketing to deliver commercial success.
As A16Z partner Martin Casado describes though, a hybrid sales approach is tricky to pull off [40]:
"There actually are a lot of conflicts in these motions and in a number of areas. And the most obvious one, and this is something that’s so prevalent in open source is, a good way to get organic growth is to give something away for free. And if you give it away for free, it may be hard to monetize it"
HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet agrees: "What you've done is you've built giant communities of people with a predilection not to pay you anything" [37]. But their sales strategy side steps this - they aren't monetizing the practitioner. They're monetizing the platform teams and the needs of the Enterprise.
Competition could have been a problem for HashiCorp, too. While there are other competing solutions, like Ansible, Chef, and others, for them, their biggest competition is themselves - specifically their open source offerings [30]. So it's their corporate marketing efforts that educate buyers on the advantages of their paid offerings.
However, this still leaves open another big concern for them - the possibility of a vendor offering services based on its products. To prevent this, they recently made the controversial move to change their open source license type, adopting the BUSL v1.1, which stops competitors from commercializing its open source creations [51]. Such licenses are called 'fauxpen' source by OSS purists, and the community has been quick to react by creating a fork of their Terraform project known as OpenTF. The long-term impact of this decision is yet to fully play out, while sentiment analysis shows mostly a return to normal after a spike of negativity [53], the OpenTF project is getting traction - the main repo has already gained over 6k stars, its manifesto 35k stars, and several large tech companies have committed to resourcing it [52]. Either way, HashiCorp knows open-source. It knew that this move would not be well received by community members. For many, it's the first overt move they've made not in the community's best interest. Clearly, though, they considered it a less risky path to extinguish the competition rather than work with its community to understand their needs and create a better offering.
Commercial success is about more than just the product, even if it's one that practitioners love (or loved). Dave describes an example customer interaction, who said: "We love your products. We love the company. The open source stuff is used everywhere inside of this bank. You have champions everywhere. But, we were never going to do a deal with you until you showed up." This is because there's a credibility gap. If you're going to do business with Enterprises, especially in the security space, you have to show that you're able to support customers of such stature. This is why it's essential to have both components, bottom-up adoption and top-down sales. It's the Enterprise sales motion where you can demonstrate this credibility and it's why their sales process follows the ALEER model:
It's a savvy approach, and one that helps foster customer loyalty and ensure a steady stream of recurring revenue. But as their Head of Growth, Caroline Guo, explains these Enterprise deals are characterized by long, resource-intensive cycles [29]:
"It often requires anywhere between 10 to 15 different people involved in a lot of these conversations for every single account... it was very much high-touch, highly-tailored marketing campaigns that would help drive a lot of these deals through"
These Account-based Marketing (ABM) tactics promote their Enterprise features and are targeted at the platform teams. But given the resource requirements, they choose their targets wisely. Their OSS adoption makes this like shooting fish in a barrel - they don't go after just anyone, instead, they pick and choose targets based on factors like community engagement, as well as product usage patterns, time in the product, or whether they've achieved specific product milestones, like deploying a cluster in production, and total volume of users. Caroline explains how this has been systemized [31]:
"We've built a set of systems that pull in data from a few different sources across open source, across our SaaS products, across the community. For all of this information, we aggregate it at the account level and it's pushed into our CRM."
It's all boiled down into simple fields within Salesforce, so Sales reps can determine when to reach out for a call. This is automated, too - they use the information from their Salesforce instance via a Data Warehouse to send prompts to their sales team in Slack [16].
This sales process is proving effective, albeit still drawn out. For example, a reference customer, a multinational financial services company, initially began using their open source solutions in 2015. Starting with Consul, Packer, Vagrant, and Terraform, they became paying customers for Terraform in 2019, Vagrant in 2020, adding Consul in 2023. In that time their earnings grew from an initial $245k/yr to over $10M/yr, but this was a deal 8 years in the making [23].
Community is critical to the effectiveness of both their DevRel and corporate marketing efforts. As a result, it's what they've built their growth flywheel around, as Dave describes [24]:
"First and foremost, the practitioner is the center of what we do... number two is about then broadening the ecosystem, and then number three is about helping our customers run these products at scale. That actually is what allows us to fund the other two things, so it's really a virtuous circle. So what's happened is as we've gotten bigger, so has our ability to invest in community."
This is what the flywheel looks like:
Developers now play a larger role in deciding which technologies they use in their work. Nearly all of HashiCorp's paid product adoption begins with open source usage. Customers discover its products through word of mouth or by seeing them at a conference. They adopt the products for free and later transition into paying customers through targeted sales efforts. But doing this at scale can be a challenge. After all, you don’t need to sign up to download an open source solution. That means HashiCorp has limited or no data on many of its users. However, as Mitchell explains, “we do some like clever tricks” such as “reverse IP searches on downloads” to identify the organizations using their products [17] and they use documentation views as a proxy for product usage [25]:
"Documentation, I think, is a particularly interesting thing to track because it is in my opinion the best measure of actual usage of a project if you do not have telemetry baked in. If a user visits documentation repeatedly, you can be sure that the user is likely using or very likely to use the software.”
While they aren't selling to community members directly, they still play a key role. Community members are often champions on large deals, and they have a dedicated enterprise sales team who work down into accounts to find the right people to talk to. As VP DevRel, Adam FitzGerald points out, though, this gives them a big competitive advantage [21]:
“If you’ve got a community that’s willing to go to bat for you, to convince their bosses they need to buy your enterprise products, and to wear their hearts on their sleeves for you, that’s invaluable.”
HashiCorp builds what they call practitioner-friendly software. They get an enormous amount of feedback from the community, straight from the folks using the products. Traditionally, infrastructure management software has been sold top-down to executives and was less focused on end users' experience. HashiCorp's community-driven approach has enabled them to reap the benefit of better, more actionable feedback.
However, having such a large community can be a challenge for product management. With so many stakeholders, you need to build discipline around understanding and contextualizing all of the product feedback you receive. For HashiCorp, Armon explains, “a lot of that just came out of spending more time with the community, more time at conferences, at user sites, in the mailing list, and on IRC... to really understand, hey, what's your use case?" [4]
The community is such an important stakeholder that they’ve architected their products with open source contributions in mind. They have this notion of the core product and enable contribution by building a plugin system around it. This means you can get started without having to dive deep into the codebase first, which has boosted contribution numbers significantly. Mitchell explains this is a design approach they adopted early on [28]:
"The first version of Terraform, which barely anyone ever used, had a really difficult plugin interface... One of the first things I did in 2.0 was introduce this framework... it made it so easy to write a provider or resource."
The rewrite paid off. While contributions to the core of a product remain rare, contributions to the plugin ecosystem are dominated by community members - as of 2022, HashiCorp products have been contributed to by more than 5,000 people [35].
The feedback from the community has enabled them to go deeper and build more comprehensive solutions than would have been possible without that input, too. Just when they would think they were getting close to achieving their vision for what a product should be, the community surfaces all sorts of use cases that hadn’t been thought about internally [4].
Their commitment to incorporating community feedback into their products shouldn’t be surprising, as they sourced many of their early engineers from within the community, as Mitchell recalls [14]:
“We literally sorted by commit count, reverse descending, and started emailing these people based on the email they had in their git commits"
Community is also now a part of its product development innovation engine. New projects are initially released to the community as open source projects without sales support. Here the intention is to get feedback and gauge market-readiness. Once they've reached a threshold of community growth, they then transition to being an emerging product where they test the willingness to pay via a specialist sales team before it becomes a core product if market adoption proves successful [23]. This enables them to further extend their product portfolio approach: "Later products were much, much easier to bring to the market,” notes Armon. Having done the hard work, cultivating users through their community efforts to build awareness and trust, all later sales conversations become that much easier [4].
Another important aspect of their approach Dave explains, is that they don't separate the teams working on Enterprise and community features: "Our product teams, they carry both mandates... They do the open source stuff and the commercial stuff. It's one team" [37].
A considerable business advantage HashiCorp’s community-driven approach accelerates is the forming of an ecosystem around its products. Starting in 2017, this ecosystem of partners now includes over 3,000 providers and 250 partners [48]. The ecosystem helps to build integrations for customers and plays a critical role in amplifying the reach, accessibility, and success of its products for their customers.
They leaned further into their ecosystem strategy by building a certification program, which over 20,000 people have completed [42]. They also custom-built their learning platform, HashiCorp Learn (now part of HashiCorp Developer), which provides hands-on exercises for teams to learn the HashiCorp toolset. This has a flywheel effect, helping solve the skills gap for companies deploying their solutions as potential customers can more easily hire new employees and train and certify existing employees to manage their systems using HashiCorp products.
Enterprises have a large set of existing technology investments and platforms. So any new software they bring in must integrate into their environment. A key component of HashiCorp’s products is its collection of “providers.” Providers are connections to integrate products with other software applications and hardware vendors. These integrations enable users to work with their existing infrastructure, which creates a strong network effect. HashiCorp themselves have built just 30 official providers. However, more than 100 verified providers (created by the community and verified by HashiCorp) and over 1,100 community providers (produced entirely by the community) have been built using community contributions [15].
The goal of all of this is to become the standard solution in their market. More customers standardizing on their products influences technology partners to build additional ecosystem integrations. This furthers the flywheel effect and grows both the ecosystem and product adoption. As HashiCorp's own site explains [35]:
"We continue to offer our products as open source because we believe that by elevating developers and practitioners to innovate in infrastructure, it helps enable the creation of broad ecosystems, and allows organizations to more easily solve integration problems and seamlessly adopt common workflows across any infrastructure element... We aim to drive standardization to accelerate the benefit to practitioners operating and developing in multi-cloud environments."
In this context, you can see why its licensing change was such a contentious move.
The effectiveness of customer enablement is measured in terms of annual recurring revenue. It's the culmination of their DevRel and corporate marketing efforts - getting the digital transformation and multi-cloud messaging to executive buyers, as well as enabling sales. This even extends to training resources to help users learn and use their products, certification programs, support forums, and live Q+A events. Partners play a critical role here, too. With systems integrators and cloud service providers also providing training and support to prospects and customers. It ends up being a joint effort to help the cloud providers bring more workloads under management using HashiCorp products [37].
While their initial choice of tools and programs may have been organic, they are now a deliberate part of an extensive set of community programs, which around 50 staff contribute to [24]. The primary way HashiCorp engages with its community is through Developer Advocacy. They have a range of programs and communication methods to try and account for all the different ways in which people learn [46]. It's also because they intend to engage directly with practitioners in a way that’s native to them [20]. This means taking the time to understand where and how their community wants to communicate versus forcing them to use a specific tool [5]. As a result, community team members aren’t just active on their platforms, but on third-party-owned platforms too, including Reddit, Stack Overflow, Hacker News, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, and LinkedIn.
One notable exception to this philosophy was with their move away from Gitter to Discourse in 2019, citing the burden of real-time chat [6]. While they have used other chat tools over the years, they continue to buck the trend of communities centralizing around real-time chat platforms. Their 29,000+ member Discourse forum is their primary communication platform [7]. But Developer Advocates also hold virtual office hours, and write blog posts, articles, documentation, and tutorials. The goal is to help members to achieve that “aha!” moment.
This range of activities focuses on four main components [21]:
The result is a vibrant community, that Principal Developer Advocate Nic Jackson highlights, is "so passionate about the tooling because it helps them do their job, so they're willing to write blogs and do videos and get up onstage and talk about things, and that really helps everybody else." Let's take a closer look at the programs that inspire such passion.
Events are a crucial part of how HashiCorp engages with its community and its investment in events started early. Jana helped them to throw their first user conference in 2015. It was an enormous undertaking for a company that at that time still only had ten full-time employees [18], but they saw events as an essential way of cementing the relationships that members of its community had formed online [9].
True to form, they were meticulous in their planning, spending weeks reviewing talk proposals and putting together a technical, highly relevant speaker lineup. The audience experience of the event was paramount, and the audio-visual setup was prioritized (in terms of budget) above everything else.
They thought they’d only get 150 or so attendees but ended up beating their expectations, selling out their first HashiConf event with 350 folks in attendance and a further 200 on the waitlist.
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Systems thinking is a core part of HashiCorp's organizational culture, the Tao of HashiCorp being a common example. Frameworks and guides inform a lot of the decisions they make and this applies to events, too. Their event strategy has been refined over time and now focuses on four building blocks:
These are the focus of their 40+ page brand guide that informs everything from the overall vibe to the visual look and feel, logo usage, messaging, and programming details [9]. These building blocks also mean rethinking what might otherwise be standard, expected elements of a conference. For example, they never throw parties. Instead, they run an "evening social" as that’s a better environment to build genuine connection.
Their approach frames events as holistic experiences. They now run two major annual conferences - HashiConf Europe and Global, which are their ultimate expression of brand experience, designed to create a closer emotional connection between HashiCorp and its community [10].
These conferences are complemented by an extensive user group program known as HashiCorp User Groups or HUGs for short. The first HUGs started in 2015, and they now reach over 49,000 people with 173 groups in 61 countries [41]. The user groups are led by community members, with the community team supporting them with content, speakers, and sometimes sending along staff to be a "floating expert on site" [26]. This program enables people worldwide to meet in person outside of HashiCorp’s schedule of events. They use Meetup Pro to run them, which enables organizers to have complete control of managing the user group logistics, while the community team can centrally control the messaging and branding. So all of the meetups globally have the same name, look, and feel [11].
Mitchell, explains the motivation behind their first few events:
"Let's just get these people that are passionate about HashiCorp in the same room so they could feel that energy and take it back and spread it"
However, he goes on to discuss how the role of events has now changed. As its community program has matured "there's tons of places you feel that energy. It's now let's learn how people are being successful" with HashiCorp tools [39]. So a big focus of their events is education, which its HashiTalks series exemplifies. It's an all-virtual, 24-hour knowledge-sharing event that enables people from all over the world to get involved. This program predated COVID by a year, but as COVID took hold, they adapted to the changing environment and went all-in on the switch to digital events, with Jana literally writing the book on it. Then when they couldn’t find any off-the-shelf event software that ticked all of their boxes, they created their own. Yep, seriously. These folks don’t mess around.
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Now we're back to in-person events, their events strategy has evolved into a hybrid one. Given the size of their audience, they could have gone the Dreamforce route, making them a big spectacle and much larger. Instead, they've kept them small and intimate. Dave calls out the reasoning behind this [37]:
"It's like a special club of people that feel like they're having a different experience to go there. And there's a brand value that gets created. It's a really important brand experience for people."
Some of its virtual events are there to reach large numbers, and make its community accessible to all. While its in-person events humanize the brand, which is important. After all, HashiCorp's security and Enterprise focus means their austere brand aesthetic makes sense, but doesn't exactly give you the warm fuzzies. Instead, they achieve this through thoughtful communication and little touches. As Jana notes, "If you are sending an email... don't have it full of marketing jargon, speak to a person like a human" or "when someone walked into any conference we did, well, if it's in the morning, we shouldn't be blasting techno, we should have a bit lower lighting and we should have people happy greeting them with coffee and food... it's just remembering the person on the other side of the experience" [30]. This extends to their virtual events, too - having art made or shipping out plants to create the perfect backdrop [44].
They've recently made a big change with the release of HashiCorp Developer. As Mitchell says, "We've invested a lot in the developer.hashicorp.com experience... we're trying to bring all of our community-facing content into one portal" [24]. Previously all product education materials were spread across multiple, individual product sites, and a separate learning platform. Now all of its documentation, tutorials, sample code, explainer videos, and hands-on lab environments for all products have been consolidated for a better user experience [45].
The HashiCorp Ambassador program seeks to recognize community members for their efforts in sharing knowledge about HashiCorp tools. Launched in 2020, there are now 102 ambassadors from 31 different countries [47]. These are individuals who have been nominated for demonstrating knowledge-sharing, kindness, and mentorship in the community. The community team helps to facilitate Ambassadors to write blog posts, create video content and conference talks, and seeks their expertise in developing certification programs. In return, Ambassadors get exclusive product release briefings, roadmap reviews, and feedback sessions, as well as some thank-you gifts.
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Given the large investment in community, it's understandable that HashiCorp would want to know the return on investment (ROI). Where Salesforce, for example, helped to determine this ROI by comparing business outcomes between those who have engaged in community, and those that haven't. HashiCorp takes this a step further, having developed its own measurement system based on impact hours. It takes into account the number of attendees or viewers of content and interactions and assigns a weighting based on its potential impact on the community. This system of measurement enables them to report on individual developer advocate performance, the potential benefit of adding additional headcount, as well as engagement by product.
As for measuring programs, they use a technique that Adam used previously at AWS: the synthetic control method. It's borrowed from the field of political science and gives them granular insights into how well its programs are working. They define control groups of community members who have or haven't been exposed to a specific activity or program. For example, whether someone attended a conference or took part in a developer advisory panel. They then look at their engagement before and after that activity, enabling them to gauge the impact and effectiveness of programs [49].
Going broader, when looking at the impact of community more generally, while they do look at downloads [37], Sr. Director of Community Development, Melissa Gurney Greene, says the most insightful data they track are issues and PRs [49]:
"Issues and pull requests really tell a story of engagement. They can tell us who's using the tool, they can tell us how they're using the tool, they can tell us what else they're using with it... it also tells us a little bit about what their experience is like."
Collating data from these gives them the ability to give the product and engineering teams a measurable roadmap from the community perspective. So they can make its offerings better for the people who actually use its tools, and not just those who offer up their opinion on social media, for example, where it's more difficult to assess whether they're actual users or not [49].
By taking the time to develop such useful metrics to measure performance, they've been able to have more productive conversations with other teams across the organization, as well as optimize staff and program performance to maximize return on community.
Rather than tagging community onto an existing marketing motion, HashiCorp has woven community into the core of its business and built a growth strategy around it. It’s a strategy that balances value creation for its community members with value capture for their own business.
The value HashiCorp captures from its community-driven approach is a sustainable competitive advantage. Not only do they have a vibrant community of users, who download, contribute to, and advocate for their products, but they also provide product feedback, report issues, contribute features, and fix bugs.
The business impact of this, combined with direct sales of a portfolio of products, bolstered by a strong partner ecosystem, is a powerful adopt, land, expand, and extend growth machine. The community gives them awareness and accelerates product adoption. This broad adoption enables their enterprise sales teams to target and sign these customers. They can then up-sell additional modules and cross-sell other products to those customers. This is why HashiCorp’s net dollar retention over the prior four quarters has been a market-beating 127-134% [22]. Its licensing switch and the fact that it isn't yet profitable shows there is still work to be done. But, if they can steady the ship and keep the community onside, then continued strong outcomes look possible.
And there we have it! That’s how community growth works at HashiCorp. If you're eager for more detail, dig into the sources below. If you found this newsletter useful, please share it with friends and colleagues. And if you haven’t already, consider subscribing below. ✌️
