The Truth About Monetizing Open Source (Without Killing Your Community)

The Truth About Monetizing Open Source Without Losing Your Community ft. Dima Grossman (Novu) | The Modern DevGTM Brew S3E1

Episode #1 | Season 03
Hosted by Disha Agarwal, Head of Marketing at Reo.Dev
Featuring Dima Grossman, Co-founder & CTO - Novu

Welcome to Season 3 of The Modern DevGTM Brew! This season, we're diving deep into the strategies, tactics, and bold bets shaping the future of Developer Go-To-Market.

In our kickoff episode, Disha Agarwal sits down with Dima Grossman, Co-founder and CTO of Novu, the open-source notification infrastructure that's rapidly gained over 40,000 GitHub stars. Dima shares his incredible journey as a three-time founder, the inspiration behind Novu, and the critical lessons learned in building and monetizing an open-source project while keeping the community at its heart.

Discover the secrets to identifying a relatable problem, nurturing an open-source community like a garden, and navigating the path to commercial viability with transparency and value creation.

Key Takeaways:

Problem-Market Fit: The foundation of a successful open-source tool is solving a problem that is deep enough and relatable enough for a community to form around it.
Community as a Garden: Building an open-source community is akin to gardening; it requires creating the right environment and nurturing, not forcing, growth.
Transparency in Monetization: Be upfront about your intentions to build a commercial company around your open-source project from the beginning to set clear expectations.
Value Creation: Focus on delivering an exceptional experience for both customers and end-users, aiming for a level of quality that even large companies strive for.
The Open Source Journey: Novu's path from a no-code tool idea to a developer-first open-source success, driven by real-world pain points.
Evolving Developer Landscape: How AI is changing the way developers search for and adopt new tools, and the increasing importance of brand and specialized solutions.

Podcast Transcript:

(Intro Teaser Music & Graphics)

00:00 - Dima Grossman (Teaser Clip):
So you, when starting an open source tool, it's very important to understand, is the problem you are trying to solve, is it like big enough and developers can relate to it, right? So like if I have somebody else from the other part of the world, invest his time, creating a pull request, investing, getting the code base. What's his motivation, right? Is this is a problem he experienced himself previously in previous companies. So first of all, for us, it was very important to understand like, is the problem deep enough and relatable enough to build a community around it?

So once you have this core element, to me, you know, building an open source community is really similar to gardening, I would say in in some point. You know, have to create the right environment around the open source community and you cannot force it, right? You cannot say, oh, I will put twice as much water on my plants and you know, they will grow faster.

You started as a startup, you kind of try to invest in the core product areas. We didn't have billing on the platform for in the beginning, but we had the pricing page. It's like we, we, we're still not charging you money for it, but you are building this, and we created this expectations from the beginning. So obviously, of course, you know, we want to create value in the communication and messaging space, right? How can we provide the best experience for, you know, our customers and users, right? And how can we create an experience that maybe only the big companies like Facebook or Google investing, you know, millions of dollars and huge teams solving. So this is I would say, you know, like identifying what are the best practices. One of the biggest problems I've seen is the…

(Intro Sequence - 01:24)

(Music and graphics: "AND WE'RE ROLLING AGAIN!")
(Title card: "The Modern DevGTM Brew")
(Title card: "SEASON #3")
(Logos: Anyscale, Sourcegraph, zenrows, novu, azul - "LEADING DEVTOOL INNOVATION")
(Featuring: Dima Grossman, Rodolfo Yiu, Raman Sharma, Enric Baltasar, Geertjan Wielenga)
(Episode Title: "THE TRUTH ABOUT MONETIZING OPEN SOURCE WITHOUT LOSING YOUR COMMUNITY - EPISODE #1")

01:52 - Disha Agarwal (Host):
This season, we've got an incredible lineup of DevGTM leaders who have scaled some of the biggest developer-first companies. We'll be diving deep into what's working in the DevTool GTM today, what's broken, and what are some of the bold bets shaping the future. And what better way to kick off this season than hosting my first guest, Dima Grossman, founder of Novu and a serial entrepreneur.

02:18 - Disha Agarwal:
Dima's journey is anything but traditional. Before building Novu, he played bass, trained as a chef, and even studied to be a wine sommelier. And now he's solving one of the biggest headaches for developers: notifications. In this episode, we'll talk about his journey as a three-time founder, how Novu became one of the fastest-growing open-source projects, and what it really takes to turn open source traction into a business. So let's dive right into it. Dima, welcome to our podcast. It's great to have you here.

02:54 - Dima Grossman:
Likewise, thank you so much Disha, happy to be here.

02:56 - Disha Agarwal:
Great. So, Dima, I would love to begin by understanding the story behind Novu. How would you describe Novu to someone who's never heard of it?

03:05 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, so we're basically building an open-source notification infrastructure platform and basically to enable our users and our customers who are building products to add notifications to their systems easily. So we offer a range of functionalities, but the core of it is that we have an inbox component which you can easily add to your product with just like a three or four lines of code. And the inbox component is really powered behind by a really like a capable system that can deliver notifications across multiple channels. It can handle things like user preferences and kind of decide whether should we deliver or not. And also an orchestration engine that tells, okay, should we deliver it now? Should maybe we wait a little bit later? And really the goal for us was how can we make sure that, you know, we're not reinventing the wheel when it comes to notifications, which is something we have done multiple times in our previous companies, always to provide it as an off-the-shelf system that developers can use and adopt.

04:03 - Disha Agarwal:
Sure. So, this is a very interesting problem to solve. What what sort of attracted you towards this space and what is the moment when you realized that, you know, there was a gap here and the world needed Novu?

04:15 - Dima Grossman:
In our previous businesses, we kind of ended up in the same situation where we needed to communicate with our customers, right? And it's not only about the marketing type of communication, which there is a lot of tools out there, you know, like the, you know, HubSpots, Mailchimps of the world when you can do marketing automation and they're doing a fantastic job. And we're still using some of them inside of Novu. But when it came to the more transactional type of notifications where, you know, users on our platform to interact with each other between themselves or maybe the system wants to interact with the users. This is where a lot of challenges came in and we had to build this from scratch and we've been looking, you know, online and and we've never found like a good platform that is capable enough and customizable enough to feed those needs. And after building this for the third time, we decided, you know, we need to stop this and this is like the idea of Novu really came out on a whiteboard somewhere on our second company and we kind of had this idea, what if it could be an external system which we can just use. We had this fantastic whiteboard session, we put it all out and then we forgot about it for, I don't know, like three or four years. And then it came back to be when we were looking for, you know, our next journey and and it was kind of came up very quickly about, you know, we're both passionate about communication, developer tooling, so it was a very kind of intuitive thing for us to do.

05:34 - Disha Agarwal:
Very interesting story. So, Dima, you also, you know, you decided to build Novu open source. One, wanted to understand what what led you to actually build it open source and how has that shaped both your product and your business?

05:49 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah. So both Tomer and myself, and Tomer is my co-founder for the past 10 years now. We both been involved in the open source community for quite a while. And and actually, Novu didn't start as open source initially, right? We actually thought when we started like the first ideation phases, we actually thought that Novu is something, you know, that product managers will actually adopt and use and maybe they will buy it. And our first POC was really around kind of a no-code tool, you know, which product managers can can adapt and use and and we quickly learned it's not really the direction. We we hit a lot of walls, you know, product managers are, you know, guardians of focus inside of the company. So if it's not the perfect timing, you know, they will just know it's not for us right now. And then on the other hand, also, once the timing was good, we ended up in a position where we've been handed over from the product manager to the engineering teams. We can build this over a weekend. It was a very defensive position. So we ended up like in this phase for almost like a few months, you know, into this, we realized, okay, this is not the direction we should head into. Also, budget was very tough with product teams. There is no like specified budget to work against. So it was kind of alarms from all over the place and we did a pivot and we decided, okay, you know, we are both, Tomer and myself are both engineers and in our kind of core and we're builders deep inside. And we started to kind of play with the idea about pitching this to engineers and trying to say, Hey, like here is our concept, do you like relate to that? Have you had a chance to build something like this previously? And we had really fantastic feedback from engineers and developers and CTOs and like technical personas inside of the organization is like, if you would been here, you know, like one year ago, you have saved us so much time. And and we we saw this spark of there is a relatable problem to it. Open Source is getting those ideas, communicating with with different developers and in the end building this result. So for us really open source was, you know, we decided that if we want to solve this, we need to, we cannot do it ourselves basically and and that's how we ended up in the open source journey.

07:49 - Disha Agarwal:
Also, I think you've you've built a fantastic GitHub community. You already have around 40,000 stars. What what worked best, you know, when when getting there? How were you able to get your initial traction?

08:01 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, so to me, it all starts with a pain point, right? So you, when starting an open source tool, it's very important to understand, is the problem you are trying to solve, is it like big enough and developers can relate to it, right? So like if I have somebody else from the other part of the world, invest his time, creating a pull request, investing, getting the code base. What's his motivation, right? Is this is a problem he experienced himself previously in previous companies. So first of all, for us, it was very important to understand like, is the problem deep enough and relatable enough to build a community around it? So once you have this core element, to me, you know, building an open source community is really similar to gardening, I would say in in some point. You know, have to create the right environment around the open source community and you cannot force it, right? You cannot say, oh, I will put twice as much water on my plants and you know, they will grow faster. It's not working like this. And you have to be patient and you have to kind of, you know, clean from time to time, provide the right environment, the right lighting, the right, the right, you know, kind of attitude and really support, but you cannot force it also on the other hand. So, you know, we're kind of, are really, this is something that was constantly in our conversations in the early days and even still is, you know, we are the gardeners of this thing. We cannot control it. It's it has its own life. We can just support it and and create guidance around it. So it won't become a jungle, hopefully, on the other side.

09:27 - Disha Agarwal:
But that brings me to to the next question. That building open source adoption in itself is tough. But then one of the real challenges is how do you move towards monetization and still stay true to the community that you've built. So how have you been able to navigate that?

09:46 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, so I think, you know, when there is, we're not the first one, right? We're doing that and we've been looking at playbooks from different types of companies. So you obviously have to make, you know, for us, obviously as a for-profit company, we're not a charity and and we're looking to find a sustainable model for us to be able to invest more time and energy into the project, but also on the other hand, provide the value and and keeping true to the open source, core kind of principle we had since since the early days. And there are different models out there, you know, there is like the open core, there is, you know, support type based. And if you look at companies like Red Hat or Elastic or Mongo, there is a bunch of playbooks. The one thing that we are doing is obviously, you know, you can self-host Novu, run it inside of your own premises, but we also offer a specific capability set that is only available on our cloud. So basically there are some features that are mostly targeting like the, you know, when building the product is that, is it something for the engineer? Is it something for the company that the engineer is working at? And how can you create this, you know, separation between the type of functionalities? And on the other hand, it's also a turnkey solution, right? You come to the cloud, you sign up, you get an API key, you can have a fully functional, you know, notification center component and and platform in less than five minutes inside of your application. We're self-hosted, you know, you still get access to everything that is there, but it it requires a little bit more of a maintenance cost on the other side. Now, another element which we found is some companies just cannot put, you know, the communication layer outside of their own premises, right? Think about healthcare, think about banking, think about insurance. And this is something we didn't expect, you know, as being an, an kind of an engine for us, but it came out to be as like, we are the only one position to do this right now on the market is, you know, you can have our cloud version, but you can also have an on-prem installation of the same enterprise features which, you know, we are powering via our kind of orchestration fleet and we help you without great pass, etc. So this is like how we did it. I I think there are different ways to approach this and I think there is a great list of playbooks out there today, even

11:49 - Disha Agarwal:
Understood. Did you face any challenges once you started monetization or do you feel that that was like a smooth journey or a smooth transition for you?

11:57 - Dima Grossman:
So one thing we didn't understand in the beginning, like it was really important for us to tell we are a commercial company. Like it's not for charity, you know, to establish the baseline. We actually had a pricing page, I think more than like, you you started as a startup, you kind of try to invest in the core product areas. We didn't have billing on the platform for in the beginning, but we had the pricing page. It's like we, we, we're still not charging you money for it, but you are building this, and we created this expectations from the beginning. We are, you know, we are trying to build a, you know, a long-lasting business and and we're here for the long term and we're trying to find the balance between, you know, a commercial viability, but also being true to the open source community. So this is something, you know, I I can't say we are perfect and and we're still learning and, you know, kind of we're trying to navigate our path into it. But I think setting the expectations from day one was very helpful for us.

12:52 - Disha Agarwal:
So I think so the key was transparency and very open communication so that the expectations were already set and monetization wasn't like a shocker or a or a, you know, deviation from what you'd wanted to build.

13:06 - Dima Grossman:
Exactly. So, you know, it's kind of putting there in the first place. I think it's very, very helpful. And, and we've all seen, you know, scenarios where it kind of goes sideways with with some companies that change their the license in the middle. So, you know, it creates a little bit more of a bad kind of feeling to the community in the end. So I would say transparency and upfront. So yeah, there is nothing bad about being upfront with with your intentions.

13:29 - Disha Agarwal:
Understood. Understood. So, Dima, Novu is part of a very booming SaaS component ecosystem. It's in a very interesting space right now. So, Stripe solved payments, Clerc solved authentication. What are some of the unique challenges that you feel that Novu is solving right now?

13:45 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, so I think for us, you know, when it comes to communication, this is where we also see ourselves as part of the same ecosystem as you've mentioned, there is a few challenges. So obviously, of course, you know, we want to create value in the communication and messaging space, right? How can we provide the best experience for, you know, our customers and users, right? And how can we create an experience that maybe only the big companies like Facebook or Google investing, you know, millions of dollars and huge teams solving. So this is I would say, you know, like identifying what are the best practices, how can we make notifications not only as, you know, a magnet for your attention, how can we make them actually meaningful? And we have, you know, in our handbook, you know, we are like the mission for Novu is to enable meaningful communication between the products and their customers. Now, the second challenge of it, you know, it's important for us that Novu feels like part of our users' application. We want to be as transparent as we can into just feels embedded and and natural, like it's your product. And how can we communicate with the products around us? And we are currently working on a really cool integration with Clerc inboxes. How can we make it seamless if we are in the presence of those tools inside of an application? How can we communicate between, let's say Stripe webhooks to produce email notifications versus, you know, Clerc webhooks to create password reset emails. And it all works in a seamless way. So like this is how we are interacting with those components and how can we provide our unique value point through the journey.

15:17 - Disha Agarwal:
Very interesting. So how how do you see, you know, the SaaS component ecosystem evolving in the next three to five years? Do you see that, you know, we'll have more plug and play components for developers moving on?

15:28 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, so I think it's always been like this, you know, if you're looking at, like the start of civilization, you've mentioned previously, we've been doing some baking with Tomer and we had a baking blog and we've been like really into, you know, wheat and and bread production. And in the end, you know, the story of food and and society is a little bit, you have people who are specializing in a very specific set of of areas. So to me, like in the SaaS and software industry, it's very similar. You have companies that are hyper-specializing, I think, in a very specific problem that they're solving. What is changing right now, in my opinion, is there is the whole ecosystem of builders, which we're seeing that is growing quite significantly. And and when they're building products, they want to focus on the core problem they want to solve, and they don't want to reinvent messaging, authentication, et cetera. And I think this is where the SaaS and Plug and Play components playing a very crucial role, I would say, of delivering value.

16:23 - Disha Agarwal:
Very interesting. What what is your roadmap and where do you see Novu in the next three to five years?

16:29 - Dima Grossman:
So for us, like I think we're still, as I mentioned this to you previously, for us, it's for running meaningful communication, and to create those channels that we want to use notifications as a communication mechanism and engine, right? So I, we see it as a fully remote company. We're sometimes limited by the quality of the notification systems inside of the software we are using, right? So we're communicating via Slack, via Notion, comments, Linear comments. And sometimes if those systems provide a bad experience, it actually hurts our ability to communicate with each other, you know, as as people, right? So we are trying to really create an experience that is seamless and it really empowers communication between people using software and also between the software that is trying to communicate to those users. And one of the areas that we figure out is a really critical piece of this philosophy and story for our end is the concept of the inbox, right? And this is the place where you are as a user, you are coming to it. I'm personally using the inbox as like my personal to-do list, right? Like this is where right now I'm in focus, I'm inside Figma or Notion or Linear. What, what requires my attention? And we really want to become this place where people can come into and they can basically, you know, be productive with notifications and we're putting a lot of emphasis on the inbox component.

17:48 - Disha Agarwal:
Yeah, I think very, very unique take on, you know, notifications and how instead of viewing it as a hindrance, how can you use it as a productivity tool. I think that's that's that's an amazing problem to solve. So, Dima, moving on to the next section, I think all discussions feel incomplete without speaking about AI. And I think AI is breaking down barriers in software development as well. People who've not really, don't have like a lot of technical skills are now building and shipping products. I recently heard a term that, you know, people are using is Vibe coding. So when you don't know coding, but you still have these tools at your disposal and you are coding, right? So what are some surprising trends that you are seeing and how do you feel that, you know, this will reshape the industry?

18:33 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah. So I think there is happening, you know, like some sort of a democratization of of software and tools. And my motivation was I want to build things. What do I need to learn to build things? Right? And and it was a little bit different then. And also with with my co-founder Tomer, like, oh, we want to build this cool app. We have to learn Angular JS or Node JS, like to make the, okay, let's do it. I think what happens right now is that democratization happens of more builders can come and build their ideas. And I think this is a fantastic thing for the industry which we're giving more people the ability to be engaged with their creativity, their vision, with what they want to do. To me, like the role we are playing in this part, you know, is again, they might be creating their unique story with their unique product. To me, it's just kind of really a democratization of this ability to create things in the, you know, digital realm, which I think is is a very welcomed concept.

19:28 - Disha Agarwal:
Very, very powerful change, as you mentioned, right? Ensuring that anyone who has creativity or has a thought, they're able to translate it into like a product without having the necessary trainings. So I think very, very interesting times ahead. Yes, exactly. Dima, do you also feel that, you know, AI is changing the way developers search for and adopt new tools?

19:50 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, 100%. We are also seeing it with Novu. You know, we're starting month by month, quite a significant increase in referrals from places like Perplexity to ChatGPT. I personally as well, you know, when I'm looking for things, kind of sometimes I go and search on Google and it like, it feels like, you know, the old days, it can be so much more powerful just to explain your problem. And it's a very niche problem and kind of get the suggestion, think, yes, like the way developers are searching for software is going to change. I think brand will play a much more crucial role. And I think also, the ability to kind of pinpoint and and find the exact tool you need for your specific problem, right? much faster is to me, that's what's happening.

20:34 - Disha Agarwal:
In the future. Interesting. So Dima, you've you've built like a really strong brand around Novu. What would your advice be for a DevTool founder who's trying to build, you know, awareness and credibility in the developer community space? Now that, you know, we've we've discussed that how developers are becoming aware of tools, how they're searching, et cetera, is changing. How have you managed to build such a big brand and build so much awareness?

20:58 - Dima Grossman:
I think it's persistence, I would say, showing up daily and, and keeping with what you do and then like this authenticity of trying to find your character and what are the strong values you believe in. It's not only about, what are you doing inside of the company? Our kind of core value was, our handbook is public. And with the team, it's not a question of, should something be public or not. So this was something that we tried to put in a lot of the things we were doing, also in our marketing material and and areas and I think we were able to find partners along the way. But if I would narrow it down, I think it's persistency and keeping consistent with the story you are telling, and and kind of making sure that you are living it, not only speaking about it.

21:39 - Disha Agarwal:
Understood. So you you have been a serial entrepreneur as we discussed, you know, in the beginning that this is your third, you know, startup. So what what keeps you excited about building new things and what keeps you going?

21:51 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, so to me, you know, this is like solving problems and and pain points to the customer, like, you know, seeing, you know, as you're able to relieve or save time or solve a specific problem, it kind of keeps me really happy. I don't know, it kind of fills energy back to me seeing this, moments of delight inside of our users and and also learning. Like I I really like to learn. It's something that, you know, fills me very strongly and and provides me a lot of motivation. So when entering, you know, when we started the whole open source, it was the first time we've done an open source company. It was the first time we've done a fully remote company. So there is a lot of learning that we're still doing up until this day. And and I think those two things are really the strongest motivators for me personally and going.

22:37 - Disha Agarwal:
I think a lot of companies that, you know, I am also sort of learning about and speaking are mostly remote. Do you feel any challenges, you know, while working in a remote setup and how do you encourage collaboration and how do you make sure that, you know, everyone is on the same page?

22:50 - Dima Grossman:
One of the biggest problems I've seen is that companies are trying to replicate office in a remote environment and they're trying to get to the same principles, maybe sometimes even the same types of people under a different environment and I think this is the wrong way to look at it. We've done quite a lot of different, there is the obvious things like people doing like the company offsites we're doing in person and trying to, gather like random gatherings of smaller teams. And we are happy to participate in that into, we're using something called Gather, which is a really fun tool that we adopted. It's like, you know, some sort of a virtual game, which is kind of an office. So, you know, you just see people inside of your area or people in the meeting room chatting, you kind of get a sense of belonging. In the end, you have to create a core center passion for the problem you're trying to solve. And I think once you have that and getting the right people on the team to facilitate that, that's, you know, really helpful.

23:41 - Disha Agarwal:
As you said, this is the first time you're building a remote first company and your previous ventures have all been on site. So what was your motivation? Why did you choose to build this remote?

23:51 - Dima Grossman:
It it really came hand-to-hand with open source. We have multiple people who are working and worked with us are from the open source community. And second of all, which is a little bit more important, we thought that if we want to solve communication problems, you know, we kind of have to put ourselves in the most difficult, I would say scenario, right? So we can truly experience the impact of a good notification center, of a good email, like how does it provide value for us? And it's really helpful for us to understand how can we improve our product and our communication between each other. So those are the two main, I would say, reasons for us to go remote.

24:28 - Disha Agarwal:
So you're living the problem to solve it, and to understand it more deeply.

24:33 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, I I wouldn't necessarily call it as, you know, a problem in terms of communication. To me, it's a little bit more of a, you know, this is just the way that I I strongly believe we're becoming kind of a more connected and a global world. And I think just to be in those shoes and and experience this to us, it's like it's it's also a challenge, but it also creates so much, you know, benefits and so much upside things that we couldn't, you know, I couldn't work with the best people I've ever worked with in my life because they're living in, you know, in India, in Greece, in Poland, and I, you know, it's just such a huge opportunity for us.

25:08 - Disha Agarwal:
Understood. If you were to launch another SaaS component startup today, what what problem would you pick up and how would you tackle it?

25:15 - Dima Grossman:
I would say experience or like the product marketing type of things. We are using multiple tools. We have the changelog, the roadmap. We're using some in-product, you know, banners and and tools to communicate with our users and and those types of areas feel like, you know, it's still like, couldn't find like a good solution for us. So I think there is a lot of realms in kind of the modern or like PLG movement for product marketing, which a lot of those challenges are are unmet.

25:43 - Disha Agarwal:
Interesting take. Thanks Dima, I think this has been an amazing conversation. But before we wrap up, let's have a quick fun rapid fire round. Are you ready for that?

25:53 - Dima Grossman:
Yes, let's do it.

(Rapid Fire Round Music - 25:55)

25:58 - Disha Agarwal:
So what's one Dev tool that you can't live without?

26:01 - Dima Grossman:
I think I would say Linear. It's become a house for us.

26:05 - Disha Agarwal:
Got it. What's one best advice you've received as a founder?

26:09 - Dima Grossman:
It might take the same time to build, $10,000 business and a $5 million business. It might be the same five years or six years. So I think that's one that's stuck with me.

26:20 - Disha Agarwal:
If you could steal one growth playbook from another startup, whose would it be?

26:23 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, so to me there is the wave of, you know, I mentioned Linear previously and I think focus around quality, this is something that, you know, I I personally feel very well connected to.

26:34 - Disha Agarwal:
Great. What is one last thing that you Googled?

26:38 - Dima Grossman:
That's a good question. I I told you before, I'm not Googling anymore. I'm ChatGPTing it. But I'm I'm learning about sailing right now, so I've I've probably searched something related to to sailing and physics of sailing.

26:50 - Disha Agarwal:
Very interesting. What's what's a tech trend that you feel is completely overhyped?

26:54 - Dima Grossman:
AI.

26:55 - Disha Agarwal:
Oh, is it? But but you're the one who uses chat GPT.

26:58 - Dima Grossman:
Yeah, I mean like it's it's not that it's a powerful, you know, thing. I think there is a hype happening there. There is a lot of value behind it, but I think it's it's definitely overhyped.

27:08 - Disha Agarwal:
If you could have dinner with any entrepreneur or investor, who would it be?

27:12 - Dima Grossman:
I think Elon Musk, like it's a personality that curiozes me. It would be an interesting conversation, I guess.

27:17 - Disha Agarwal:
I'm sure. What's one thing most people get wrong when they're trying to do open source?

27:22 - Dima Grossman:
I think focusing on technology too much and and not about a problem they're trying to solve or building a good product out of it. It's not only about code, it's not only about the technical aspects of it, and the core product and problem solving has to be there.

27:38 - Disha Agarwal:
If you could instantly solve one challenge at Novu, what would that be?

27:42 - Dima Grossman:
Um, I I would say communication. This is funny, funny as it sounds. I think, you know, we are always trying to figure out how can we communicate more effectively. Like if there was a magic wand to fix that, we would definitely use it.

27:58 - Disha Agarwal:
Dima, this was such an amazing conversation. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

28:04 - Dima Grossman:
Thank you, it was a pleasure being here.

(Outro Music & Reo.Dev Logo - 28:05)