Lago

6.6k Github Stars! I remember when we had 127 stars, I was freezing and working from a WeWork in Wynwood, in Miami (🥶 what's wrong with the AC there?!). I was literally wondering "how does it feel to have 3k stars?" (answer: it actually doesn't change your life!) Joke aside, I tried not to get obsessed with stars early on, for several reasons: 1️⃣ All projects aren't created equal, for this aspect. Billing is still an engineering nightmare, but not all the engineers have been confronted to this challenge (and our mission is that fewer and fewer will be!). This contrasts with data tools, front-end projects, etc that can resonate with nearly any engineer. The same reasoning can apply if you're building an industry specific project and sell to Enterprise customers, Reshma Khilnani at Medplum is a great example (blog example in the comments). 2️⃣ Find your north star... and it might not be Github stars Revenue if you monetize may be an obvious one. There might be more qualitative indicators as well: the quality of logos using Lago in production, is one of ours for instance. We won competitive evaluations to serve Mistral, Together, Groq, early on. Some open-source founders measure the vibrancy of their community not only by Slack/discord members, but by measuring the proportion of answers that are given by the community itself, and not by team members. Said differently: do community members talk to each other organically? 3️⃣ Having a decent number of Github stars gives a nice credibility boost though! What "decent" means in terms of numbers depends on the industry. I think in our case, we thought 3k was a good place to be. We've also shared how we got our first 1k stars, will link our blog post in the comment! And huge thanks to our community members, and so proud of the team! 🙌 Jérémy Denquin Raffi Sarkissian Mathieu Déjean Michael Ponrajah

💔 How to break a founder's heart "I don't recall it being painful at all", Tom Blomfield, Monzo & GoCardLess, about "billing". When our pivot to billing was still fresh, we pitched Lago as "Billing for Fintechs", and we were not pleased by Tom's answer... 😳 cc Raffi Sarkissian. In hindsight, it made us progress much faster: FROM "Billing was painful at Qonto (neobank/previous company) so it should be the same for all Fintechs around the world, regardless of every other aspect!" TO "Is it really an industry specific challenge, or is it more based on use cases and company stages? Should we start from there and narrow it down to industry specific examples?" Defining the positioning and the Ideal Customer Profile is a "living organism" (our product moves fast, "all we have is velocity"!) and the market as well, but we came up with a more relevant framework, sharing it here as well. "When billing becomes so complex that it becomes an engineering challenge" (see image 2) Thanks again Tom Blomfield, you kind of broke our heart but you did it with kindness and it was for good reasons 🤣🤣🤣

Y Combinator doesn't stop after the batch! And I truly encourage any entrepreneur to consider applying! Our batch was remote (covid), so it was great to feel the in-person momentum. I was fortunate to speak at 2 YC events this week-end and the energy was 🔥🔥🔥 I shared the outlines as screenshots, in a nutshell 👇 1️⃣ Open-source panel We've seen an increasing number of open-source companies and 🦔 james hawkins, Tim Glaser, Jeffrey Morgan + Nicolas Dessaigne shared our journey: - Why open-source, - Monetization: when, how, - The metrics we track (do stars really matter?), - Do's and Don'ts on Hacker News as well! 2️⃣ Startup School, 600+ of fresh technical graduates Some of them are already building pretty impressive stuff. I felt like a grandma 👵, and told Nicolas Dessaigne before speaking "some of them might be half my age, really!!!" 🤣 Most questions were around: - When to start - Choosing a cofounder and navigating a breakup (it happens a lot, always feels like the end of the world on the spot... but it's not) - Pivoting - The chemistry you need with the idea, team, cofounder, to keep you going Should we share more about that with Raffi Sarkissian? Bonus: Last but not least, look at who I bumped into in the speakers' lounge! It was an impromptu unplanned quick office hour with Paul Graham about Lago 🙌.

The internal tagline of Lago is "The Open Revenue Hub" We keep it internal because it's not self explanatory (yet). A quick explanation: 1️⃣ We focus on solving the metering and billing challenges as "Step 1" 2️⃣ We connect, support, help orchestrate revenue ops as "Step 2", by leveraging the metering and billing data and system we've helped our users to build. "Step 2" can't happen without "Step 1", because you can only orchestrate RevOps if you can rely on accurate usage and billing data. That's why I'm SO excited about our Launch Week! Because Raffi Sarkissian couldn't only fit one news per day: - We have 2 new integrations (check out the video in the link!): NetSuite and Xero - We've also made sure our community could experiment and leverage AI - and are pleased to offer $2,500 of OpenAI to our users, can't wait to see what is built! 🙌

It's day 1 of Launch Week II Starting with... 2 integrations! 🔥

MYTHS BUSTING about the French 🇫🇷 🥖 and how they spend their summer 1️⃣ The Olympics! Most Parisians already left Paris a while ago because the Olympics have a huge impact on our daily lives, how we commute, etc. So most non-French people I know will experiment more of the Olympics than the "locals". 2️⃣ Two months off! We don't take two months off. I mean, maybe if you're a teacher and your students are on vacation... but no, we don't have unlimited PTO! Also we're not necessarily big fans of the "côte d'Azur" , so Cannes, Nice etc, are places most of my American friends know, but I've never been for instance. 3️⃣ Wait... they're not necessarily staying in Europe?! Most entrepreneurs I know actually try to find a quiet place to work from, or spend the summer in the US. I've done it twice since starting Lago, and this summer (I actually moved in the Bay, so I'm already here!), we're flying part of the 🇫🇷 team to work with the 🇺🇸 team here. A pretty active and fun summer in perspective at Lago!! Also, I'm so happy to join and speak at in-person events in the coming weeks (nothing beats 'in-person'), we're still brewing additional things, but you can meet us at: 1️⃣ Y Combinator Open-Source Meetup - July 26th, San Francisco 2️⃣ Startup School by Y Combinator, look at this line up! 🤩 I'm so excited - July 27th, San Francisco We'll prep a fireside chat with Nicolas Dessaigne about our journey Lago (YC, pivot, EU vs US, all of it!), can't wait to connect/catch with other founders: Marty Kausas 🦔 james hawkins Christina Cacioppo Han Wang and many more! 3️⃣ Fintech Devcon by Moov - August 8th, Austin. Two years ago we were honored to be featured there by Joel Taylor from GitHub, so it's quite special to be speaking there this year! If you're wondering, we're still hiring and ping Alison Eastaway for more info!

IF AI agents replace one or several FTEs (aka "full time equivalent humans"), how should they be priced? It's too soon to say for AI agents that are mostly priced "per seat" at the moment (i.e., a fixed price per user, regardless of the task the agent is performing, the value it brings, or the compute price it costs to run the agent). Copilots pricing might be a good proxy or at least data point to think about AI agents pricing, and I found Tomasz Tunguz analysis and charts the most useful. TLDR: The Variance between the AI versus Base price ratio is high, meaning... it "depends". Our take at Lago is that: 1️⃣ Pricing is as much science than art (humans choose products and react to pricing, and humans... aren't fully rational!), especially in such a "new" field (i.e., what agents can do today is nothing like what they'd be able to do in a few months). 2️⃣ Velocity is key: so the most important is to be able to iterate quickly on pricing, to make price match value, and anticipate/react to market shifts: cost of compute, demand, competition, just to name a few dimensions. 3️⃣ To offer pricing velocity and flexibility: we've built Lago to be developer first-, agnostic, and transparent (open-source). There's no big secret there: if you understand our code and how we built our API, and have a community of users around you, you're able to use it, build on top of it, and customize it faster and better. Once again we're both proud and humbled (weirdly enough you can combine both feelings 😅) to serve leading teams and companies, such as Mistral, Groq, Together, and many others! (*Copilot vs Agents: Agents are supposed to automate entire tasks versus "copilots" support "pilots/humans".) Source: https://lnkd.in/esN4uVBf)

*34* ! 👏🥳 Is it Raffi's age? Mine? 😆 Not really... It's our #34 product update, we sent the first one 24 months ago, this means we shipped new releases more than once a month for two years now! So proud of the team! Mathieu Déjean Michael Ponrajah Jérémy Denquin + team 🫶 Looking back, we've followed our plan exactly as we visualized it: 1️⃣ We were first laser focused on: "pure" usage metering and billing features, to build the foundations of our product. These were not the most visible parts or shiniest part, but we intentionally invested a lot of efforts into building for robustness, as we'd built for scale at Qonto previously. 2️⃣ More recently, we've been working on more "collaboration" features: - Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) - Sigle Sign-On (Okta) And of course: the integrations with the rest of the stack: Netsuite, Salesforce etc anyone? :) That being said: I didn't expect to have Alison Eastaway jumping in in the Product Update though! 🤣 You can find all our product updates on our website: link in the comments and happy to demo in-person as well! 🙌

My fav question in interviews? "What did you dream of being when you were a kid?" So... Jim dreamt of becoming an Astronaut 🧑🏻🚀 when he was a kid, to explore the far reaches of the galaxy. Guess what? He didn’t! Unless Apple and Kodak built rockets in their early days 🤔 Instead he spent 30 years in Go to Market, within the most successful companies on the planet. His latest ‘stint’ was as the CMO of Stripe, where Claire Hugue Johnson (yes, the author of Scaling people) recruited him, after being CMO & VP Growth at New Relic, VP Communities at Yahoo!, VP at @Kodak and founding its own venture! How did Go-To-Market approaches evolved over time? What are the differences between early and late-stage pricing iterations? What happened when Lew Cirne asked him to lead New Relic’s Commercial Sales teams after a year leading product? What are the go-to resources every Go-To-Market leader should read? Full interview here: https://lnkd.in/d4yay6CZ

"My parents never understood what my company is about" -- say most B2B founders. 🙈 In 🇫🇷, we'd say Lago solves the "facturation" challenge (means "invoicing") but the English is more precise. Raffi Sarkissian made this awesome mini-app to explain what "metering" and "billing" are, in plain words/images! 🤩 TLDR: Lago solves for: 1️⃣ Metering: measuring consumption, it's complex when it's by the second, minute, etc. For instance in the case of measuring electricity consumption. 2️⃣ Billing: how much a customer should pay, based on pricing, consumption, and any other element of context. Do you have a subscription, does it include usage, did you have a coupon, is there a pricing for peak hours etc 3️⃣ Invoicing: issuing the legal document that is going to be used for accounting and audit purposes and needs to comply for local requirements: taxes, special mentions Is it really a pain? How did you come up with such a "random" idea?! 🙃 Well we lived it first hand and built a home-grown billing system at the time at Qonto! You can also ask our users: Mistral, Swan, Fintecture, Together, Groq :)