Four months ago, our closest competitor, Airplane publicly announced the shut-down of its platform, following its acquisition by Airtable.
The shutdown had a short timeline and Joshua Ma, CTO of Airplane, recommended Windmill as one of the migration path. Here are lessons we learned from it:
1️⃣ You have to build your own luck
We found ourselves overnight with an enormous influx of customers, with clients among the very top tier of the SV. They had the strictest requirements that exceeded vastly those of our then customers. For instance, one required 600 edge workers in remote location with sparse connections such as oil rigs. We had the concept of remote agent but that was a leap. However, we had built Windmill in anticipation of those knowing that an infra developer software could not compromise on performance, reliability and extensibility. As such, only minor modifications were required.
There were other gaps, many of them, Airplane was an excellent product with a top-tier team. Burning the candle at both ends, and benefiting from very strong foundations, the team filled all the missing gaps. 50 of the 55 enterprise clients referred did the 1-month trial, all 50 of them are still with us to-date. They constitute 60% of our revenue to date.
2️⃣ Open-source is vital for core infra
The first question everyone asked is why should they trust yet another startup. They were right. Airplane had an excellent reputation, and seemed successful. If it happened to them, why not us. A platform like Windmill is business critical, it handles a large part of your critical business logic. They had learned their lessons and could not afford it again.
From day one, Windmill has been open source and if something were to happen to us, our code will outlive us. 95% of Windmill is fully open-source, including the workflow engine, the core of our IP. The entire platform is air-gaped and only require a license key. We added a clause to all of our contracts that they would be granted a perpetual key in case of cease of operation. Without requiring trust, all skepticism got dissipated.
3️⃣ The lean open-source startup
We are a lean team of 6, with 5 eng, now profitable. Our prices are transparent and competitive. If we were to inflate the price, customers would try to get-by with the open-source version. The bet of open-source is a bet on volume and hegemony. We are transparent because we bet that we win not on sales, but on having the overall best tech and best product and can focus on improving those. We do no marketing and no sales, all of our customers are inbound.
We however spend a great time on customer success, all feature requests are done usually under 2 weeks, most questions answered in the next 10 mins and then incorporated to the docs. All of our energy is spent on how to improve the value of the software because that is still the royal path towards Windmill powering the internal stack of the Enterprise of all sizes.
