This time we welcome Jonathan Reimer to the podcast. Jonathan and I dive straight into his company 'crowd.dev', where they are working hard at building an open source developer data platform that they hope will help customers get a clear picture of how developers engage with their brand, their tools, and the developer community in general.

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Continuing on theme from Emily Omier's episode last week, we discuss the magic word "profitability". With over five thousand open source products on the market, not everyone can 

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bank on being the next Red Hat - so how can the rest of us do it? Few people would know better than Jonathan and the team at crowd.dev, as not only do they specialise in finding revenue opportunities for open source companies, they’re an open source company themselves.

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Like many of us, Jonathan stumbled into the world of developer relations, meetups and open source products somewhat by accident. With a background in economics that became a career in sales and marketing, Jonathan realised that developers had a huge influence over the products their companies ended up purchasing. If he wanted those developers onside, the product had to be open source - from there, he founded crowd.dev and the rest is history.

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He also informs me about a system called ‘accounts-based marketing’ that crowd.dev has had a lot of success with. How do you prove that your services are either making or saving money for a business? Accounts-based marketing is a new way for companies like crowd.dev to get proper attribution from customers, and display the value they add to the companies they work for.

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For anyone interested in the nitty-gritty of life as an open source company, this one's for you.

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