GitLab's Application for Y Combinator Winter 2015

What this post added

This post introduces GitLab's application for Y Combinator in Winter 2015, detailing the company's mission to create open-source software for code collaboration. It highlights the existing product's capabilities, including version control, pull/merge requests, forking, public projects, wikis, issue trackers, and GitLab CI with distributed workers. The post also mentions the company's current operational base, founder introductions, and progress metrics such as over 100,000 organizations using GitLab and a significant monthly revenue growth rate. It positions GitLab as a strong competitor in the on-premises market, emulating Netflix's strategy of focusing on the 'DVD' (on-premise) market while competitors focus on 'video-on-demand' (SaaS). The core idea is to leverage the open-source development process for marketing and product-market fit, with a proprietary commercial version for scalable revenue.