#  Strategy

We will only be successful if the whole Node-RED community is successful.

Our company strategy has three parts:

  • Drive the growth and success of the Node-RED project
  • Build a platform that becomes the standard way of running Node-RED at any scale
  • Build an inclusive, high-performance team

#  Drive the growth and success of the Node-RED project

Node-RED is at the core of what we do. It is the reason the company exists. Our success is fed by the success of the core project. Node-RED enables tens of thousands to create and maintain workflows and logic of both physical devices and digital services. Ensure their effectiveness grows, while new users are introduced to Node-RED is vital to the success of FlowForge.

FlowForge will drive the Node-RED project through:

  • Deliver features to the core of Node-RED that are stable and provide value to the community
  • Actively participate in the community to establish a positive reputation and level of engagement
  • Be model citizens for the open governance of the project. Our activities that impact the core are discussed and developed in the open.
  • Establish close relationships with other stakeholders of the project - those who have their own commercial interest in the success of the project. Encourage participation and engagement in the core project.
  • Driving adoption of Node-RED through our advocacy and our actions.

#  Become the standard way of running any Node-RED at any scale

There's a wide range of deployment scenarios and FlowForge aims to build a platform to help each of them to be successful. FlowForge will solve challenges unsolved by Node-RED and push Low-Code beyond the capabilities of Node-RED.

Firstly, team collaboration. Allowing Flows to be developed by multiple individuals, ensuring quality and correctness. Push the boundaries of Low-Code to allow more people to collaborate.

Secondly, Node-RED is deployed in many different environments. FlowForge will allow everyone to achieve the best results whatever the execution context.

We believe these two points will make FlowForge synonymous with Node-RED, and make it attractive to individual users as well as Enterprises. Value offered will increase exponentially as the platform scales to teams of developers and larger deployment scenarios.

#  Build an inclusive, high-performance team

As a new company that starts small but aspires to grow, we need to ensure that growth is well managed, sustainable and rewarding.

Our values help shape the culture we want to build, both inside the company and beyond.

#  Strategic Initiatives

#  2022

There are four pillars of the product we're investing in:

  1. Provide the best Node-RED experience.
  2. Enable users to run Node-RED at the edge.
  3. Enable teams to collaborate when working with Node-RED.
  4. Meet the compliance needs of the enterprise.

The product plan goes into this in more depth. Check out our roadmap for on what we're pursuing in the next few releases.

Furthermore, we will continue our involvement with the Node-RED community.

  1. Provide technical leadership and direction - This includes

    • Flow Testing Framework
    • Runtime Hooks on Deploy path

  2. Improve the node ecosystem. This includes:

    • node-red-dev - CLI tool for node developers to help them produce higher quality nodes
    • Integrating node-red-dev into the Flow Library to provide node scorecards

  3. Improve the Getting Started experience - update and expand the getting started docs to provide a more consistent and broader range of options/platforms to run on.

  4. Community events

    • Establish a regular Node-RED virtual meetup for community members to share what they are doing with Node-RED.
    • Work towards a global Node-RED Con 2022 event in conjunction with the Node-RED Japan User Group. Build on the success of the 2021 event's global track, to make it bigger, with more EU/US-centric content and timezone accessibility

#  Key metrics

At FlowForge we're engaged in many initiatives to grow our offering and assess product market fit. Currently we're measuring 2 key metrics which serve as heuristic for company wide success.

#  Installed Platforms

FlowForge is the key product we're verifying in the market currently. Each platform installed and running shows value is delivered to customers. Through telemetry we know the number of instances that reported their unique instance ID.

Other than the number of unique instances reporting on telemetry the last 7 days we measure the number of managed instances of Node-RED through FlowForge. This is the sum of projects and devices.

Telemetry collection is opt-in, and dependant on an internet connection. As such it's anticipated to under report the true number of FlowForge managed instances.

Target growth for this metric is 10% week over week.