In 2012, a regular developer from Ukraine Dmitriy Zaporozhets, co-founder of GitLab, tried to make money through donations…

He earned $100/month.

In 2018, his company achieved $1.1 billion valuations.

What has helped him to make that huge jump that you can replicate?

In 2011, he decided to solve his own problem (there was GitHub – service for developers, but it didn’t allow to be installed on your own server). So Dmitriy started to develop their own open-source service after the full-time job.

In 2012, Dmitriy tried to make money through donations but earned just $100/month.

In 2013, Dmitriy tweeted “I’m sick and tired of my day job, I want to work on GitLab full-time”. Sid Sijbrandij – one of the voluntary contributors of the GitLab – offered him to join forces + monthly salary. They became co-founders.

Later in 2013, they tried to make money of consulting, support, but it didn’t work well enough.

Some of the users (enterprises) asked to develop additional features.

By summer 2013, GitLab Enterprise Edition was born. It was a game changer.

Here’s the full growth hacking model uncovered:

1. As a developer, you download and use the open-source service for free.

2. Then you like it, tell your friends and connect your team.

3. At some point, you need some features that are available only in the GitLab Enterprise Edition.

4. You go to your corporate accountant and ask him to acquire it.

By 2015 they had:

+ 600 voluntary contributors.

+ 100.000 users.

+ $1M annual revenue (Qualcomm, NASA, Nasdaq OMX, and Interpol were among paying customers).

+ 60% growth in revenue each month.

In winter 2015, they sent this exact application to Y Combinator and got accepted.

In summer 2015, after Y Combinator’s demo day they raised $1,5M in funding + in a few months $4M more.

In 2016 – $20M.

In 2017 – $20M.

In 2018 – $100M at a $1.1 billion valuation.