Would it be as big if they had stopped to consider all scaling issues at the beginning?
In 2015 we only had the people to focus on one thing. We opted to focus on the downloadable product. This grew our revenue much faster than GitLab.com. We started to focus on .Com in 2016 but in hindsight not aggressive enough. Now it is one of our top three priorities.
You could argue it would be bigger. Instead of working around Travis to connect to repositories, the repositories are there. That's the biggest sell for me, anyway.
(Note: I agree w/ the OP + commenter whole-heartedly)
The other counter-example I can think of is Myspace who frequently had tons of server errors and page load errors alongside failing to iterate their product rapidly.
Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
by EduardoBautista on Sunday April 09, 2017 @01:20AM
(#14070623)
gitlab.com is not their core business. It's mostly a demo.
In 2015 we saw it as our demo. In 2017 we see it as one of our two main products and are improving performance accordingly. 95%+ of our revenue is still coming from licenses instead of GitLab.com. But over time this week change.
Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
by stingraycharles on Sunday April 09, 2017 @03:19AM
(#14070917)
That's not how people perceive it, though.
Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
by kiriakasis on Sunday April 09, 2017 @04:54AM
(#14071216)
How people perceive it is not relevant if it actually is a side business
Re:Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
by user5994461 on Sunday April 09, 2017 @07:59AM
(#14071852)
How people perceive it may be impacting your main business.
They haven't failed (yet), but I think gitlab.com would be a lot bigger if they scaled faster. Lots of people have been rejected using it because it was too slow.