Strategy

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FlowFuse's Mission

FlowFuse will empower 1 billion people to fuse the digital realm and physical reality through building bespoke workflows, applications, and integrations, unleashing their creativity so that they can effortlessly leverage their own skills and expertise.

Achieving our Mission

At the core of FlowFuse is Node-RED, the Low-Code platform that allows many to build software with little or no coding knowledge. This enables anyone to be innovative and develop solutions to be successful in their respective roles. FlowFuse will only be successful if Node-RED becomes the default way to write software for hundreds of thousands of people. FlowFuse is, and will remain, the primary contributor to Node-RED. Our product is the best way to run Node-RED at any scale.

Furthermore, FlowFuse aims to make it a great experience to build, deploy, and maintain software -- especially for non-software engineers. Allowing complex things to be achieved. Two good examples are

  1. FlowFuse Dashboard - Allowing to build Dashboards and interactive applications
  2. Project-Link - Linking Edge devices to the Cloud, enabling broadcasts and point-to-point connections

A key differentiator for FlowFuse is our approach to licensing of our software. The core is open, free as in beer and as in speech. Our product is open for scrutiny, usage, improvements, for the world. While there's a subset of the product proprietary licensed, the source is available to read. We believe that Open Source Software plays a key part in education, reducing vendor lock-in, and community building.

The market

We focus on Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) companies, which are those in manufacturing, logistics, and other data-intensive industrial sectors where operational efficiency is critical to providing value.

Within those companies, we focus our outreach and marketing activities on people who are responsible for improving engineering processes. These individuals are often Architects, Engineering Managers, and specialists in IT or OT.

The problems

  1. Data is in Silos and Inaccessible: Industrial data is often hard to access and extract, fragmented, and trapped within disparate systems, making it difficult to access and consolidate for analysis. Engineers need a way to break down these silos and unify their data sources.
  2. Lack of Visualization and Feedback Loops: Existing industrial data systems often fail to provide intuitive visualizations and real-time feedback mechanisms. Engineers need a platform that allows them to easily visualize data, monitor performance, and quickly identify areas for improvement.
  3. Barriers to Building Solutions: Many industrial engineers lack the correct tools and resources to build custom applications for their specific needs. IT departments typically are focused on business operations and don’t have expertise on industrial systems or processes. However, data analysis applications for industrial processes also need to meet company security and compliance requirements. The industrial side of the organization requires a solution that empowers them to create solutions, within compliance guidelines, without relying heavily on IT departments or external developers.
  4. Overwhelming Complexity of Industrial Systems: Industrial environments are characterized by a vast array of protocols, technologies, and legacy systems. This complexity makes it difficult for teams to integrate and leverage data from different sources into a view of operations that can help identify optimizations.

Why these problems are significant

  1. Suboptimal Decision-Making: When engineers lack access to comprehensive and timely data, they are forced to make decisions based on incomplete or inaccurate information. This can lead to missed opportunities, inefficient processes, and costly errors.
  2. Slow Response to Issues: Without real-time feedback loops and interactive visualizations, it can be difficult to detect and respond to emerging problems promptly. This can result in production delays, quality issues, and increased downtime.
  3. Missed Opportunities for Innovation: The inability to easily build custom solutions stifles innovation. Engineers may have brilliant ideas for improvements but lack the means to implement them, leaving valuable potential untapped.

The Value

The FlowFuse Platform addresses the problems status above by providing our ICP with the tools they need to:

  1. Unify and Access Data: FlowFuse breaks down data silos, aggregate data from disparate sources, and make it easily accessible for analysis and decision making in a secure way.
  2. Visualize and Interact: FlowFuse offers intuitive visualizations, real-time feedback loops, and interactive dashboards that enable engineers to monitor performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.
  3. Build Custom Solutions: The low-code platform empowers engineers to create custom applications, dashboards, and automation workflows without extensive coding knowledge.
  4. Simplify Complexity: We abstract away the complexities of industrial systems, providing a comprehensive user-friendly interface that allows engineers to focus on solving problems, not wrestling with technology. See also our Messaging page.

FlowFuse uses Open-Source technologies like Node-RED and MQTT to help our customers being successful in remedying their problems.

Measuring Success

There's multiple ways to align a company around business goals, and at FlowFuse we've identified KPIs. A KPI is a tool to identify problems and areas for improvement.

KPI

A KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a heuristic metric for company-wide success. At FlowFuse we're engaged in many initiatives to grow our offering and assess product-market fit.

We review KPIs every Tuesday as part of our recurring strategy meeting. At this time, we review the following KPIs:

  • Product & Engineering
  • Marketing
    • Pipeline Generated
  • Sales
    • cARR Projected (This Q)
    • cARR Closed (This Q)
    • cARR Goal (This Q)

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

Now that FlowFuse has a stable and maturing product, we're trying to verify product-market fit. This requires sales, and ARR is a good metric to track this.

Incidental revenue that's not recurring does not factor into this metric, as it's hard to build a business on unpredictable revenue streams. Furthermore, it's usually harder to scale.

Strategy Meeting

To maintain high velocity and accountability, the strategy team gathers every two weeks. This meeting is not for status updates; it is strictly for decision-making, unblocking strategic initiatives, and translating strategy into immediate tactics.

Meeting rules

  1. Pre-Read Mandatory: KPIs and the agenda must be in the doc 24 hours prior.
  2. Exception-Based Reporting: We only discuss "Red/Yellow" metrics (blockers/risks).
  3. Disagree & Commit: Strong debate is encouraged, but once a decision is made, it's made and everyone executes as one.
  4. The Kill List: To add a new initiative, we must explicitly define what we are stopping to free up capacity.

Meeting agenda

Time Agenda Item Goal Owner
00:00 - 00:05 Quarterly OKR Re-anchor on Quarterly OKR. CEO
00:05 - 00:15 KPI Scoreboard Review only off-track numbers (The Brutal Facts). CEO
00:15 - 00:40 Strategic Topic Discuss one major strategic topic or signal. Topic Owner
00:40 - 00:55 Tactics & Kill List Update the action list, and assign owners. Review open list of last meeting, review Say vs Do ratio. Chief of Staff