Fermyon’s Developer-First PLG Strategy: Building a Cloud Platform Without Alienating Platform Engineers
The tension between developers and platform engineers has long been a thorny challenge in cloud computing. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Matt Butcher revealed how Fermyon turned this friction point into a product-led growth opportunity.
Understanding the Core Friction
“Developers wanted to be able to build their code once and have it run on lots of different architectures, but the container ecosystem wasn’t quite set up that way,” Matt explains. This meant “developers had to really be in the know about everything that happened on the operational side of the house with the platform engineers.”
The result? A constant back-and-forth that frustrated both sides. As Matt notes, “That always kind of introduced a little friction because there’s a lot of tossing things over the wall and having them. This doesn’t work here, I can’t give you access to production.”
The Platform Engineer’s Perspective
What made this challenge particularly interesting was that platform engineers weren’t unhappy with the status quo. “Flip the coin to the other side and ask the platform engineers, how do you feel about this world? And they’re like, finally we have an infrastructure service that’s declarative, where we can just describe what we want and deploy it. We like that world.”
The friction came from the aftermath of issues: “On the flip side, the developers are really frustrating because anytime something breaks in production, we have to push it back over to the developers to fix because everything is so tied into the infrastructure.”
Building the Solution
Rather than choosing sides, Fermyon built their strategy around a clear, measurable promise: “As a developer, I can go from blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less.” As Matt reveals, “Every single person in the company knows that line, has it memorized because it was just, we drilled it in. This is the story we want to be able to tell.”
This focus shaped their product rollout strategy. “We built a developer oriented cloud to launch in October, knowing that then after that we would begin building up the second phase of our strategy, which was how do we create, how do we make Fermyon cloud the best place to run your serverless applications?”
The PLG Implementation
Fermyon’s product-led growth strategy followed three key phases:
- First, they launched an open source project, allowing both developers and platform engineers to experiment with the technology.
- Next, they released a cloud platform with a generous free tier, ensuring that “anybody should be able to run their website and a couple of other applications at a production grade quality in Fermyon cloud.”
- Finally, they introduced a paid tier that “introduces the more professional aspect. Right. You can run lots and lots of applications here. You get much higher bandwidth and much higher processor and memory allocations.”
Early Results
The strategy showed promise immediately. Their first open source launch “trended way up on hacker News and we had thousands and thousands of page views on our website, thousands of downloads.” The cloud platform followed suit, growing from zero to “up in the thousands and still growing” users.
The Enterprise Opportunity
Looking ahead, Fermyon sees their developer-first approach as key to enterprise adoption. “The real value of serverless long term is that it can cut cost at a very. And the higher you scale, right. The more applications you have, the more cost it’s going to cut,” Matt explains.
This creates a compelling enterprise story: “You can have your developers writing less code, you can have them iterating much faster, and you can make a huge 20, 30% byte out of the cost of operations of these services as you go.”
For B2B tech founders navigating competing user personas, Fermyon’s approach offers valuable lessons. Rather than trying to please everyone immediately, they started with a laser focus on developer experience while keeping platform engineers’ needs in mind for future phases. This staged approach allowed them to build momentum with developers while laying groundwork for the enterprise features that would ultimately benefit both user groups.
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