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I can link you up with a global payment processing fintech. Mid market/smb ERp and CRM are being commoditized. The fintech works with these cominies to bolt on the payment opportunity on the AR and AP side. For example a $10m year biz represents $10-$18m in payments. I.E., about a $100 to $200k profit oppty - recurring.
Open sourcing is a good idea - it allows for platform innovation and adoption - while regulated services becomes the profit driver.
Your other comments sound dispassionate about your product. It makes it sound like you are only interested in growing a company and not in solving problems for your customers. You said you arent interested in slowly growing a business that is currently making you money This is completely at odds with growing an open source community. Its typically one of the slowest and most thankless jobs you can do in software. nix…
Er, there's people who worked on it at Bell Labs in the 70's who would like to have a word. It's taken 50 years for Unix to become an overnight success for you normies to become interested...
I think you're looking with the wrong lenses here. Open sourcing targets the wrong audience, and F# is such a niche language that you'll probably have zero traction, especially in a space like CRM/ERP, which has well established open source solutions like Odoo.
If you want to grow, start to focus on your GTM strategy. You can obviously build a product, and your customers are a testament that you have, at least, some PMF. Do outbound sales -- this space is clearly one that you can afford that --, and invest in marketing. Your website desperately needs some professional work there.
Open sourcing as a strategy works when there is a lot of developer interest and (usually) a developer is the beneficiary of the software (that doesn't mean the developer is the end user, but take WordPress, even if it's used by a lot of marketers for websites, it is developers who are the ones using it to produce those websites).
If your product is CRM/ERP, is there a lot of developer involvement in the provision of the software? And if not, what is the enabling factor for your beneficiaries to be able to take a FOSS package and begin to realize value? Don't confuse positive feedback of "this is cool" etc with positive feedback from buyers and beneficiaries.
FOSS B2B software communities work when there is value in not using the commercial version. Why would anyone who needs a CRM/ERP want to use a FOSS product when they would have budget to buy a commercial version and gain commercial support. I would assert that all users of CRM/ERP software have budget - unfortunately they just don't want to spend it on your product and so why would they then want to take the same product for free instead?
I think you need to have a clear reassessment of why your business is where it is (where it isn't) and what would change that. Not sure that open sourcing solves that. Good luck.
Your other comments sound dispassionate about your product. It makes it sound like you are only interested in growing a company and not in solving problems for your customers. You said you arent interested in slowly growing a business that is currently making you money This is completely at odds with growing an open source community. Its typically one of the slowest and most thankless jobs you can do in software. nix…
nix has been around for 10+ years and only recently are normies like me becoming interested in it. Er, there's people who worked on it at Bell Labs in the 70's who would like to have a word. It's taken 50 years for Unix to become an overnight success for you normies to become interested...
A few thoughts: 1. Is your target customer a software developer? It seems like your customer would be a executive, perhaps at a smaller business. You want to get that person's attention. I think open-sourcing is more likely to get developer attention. 2. There are lots of other marketing strategies you could try (content-based marketing, going to tradeshows, cold calling, etc). 3. If you have existing customers, I th…
Your thoughts on the developers vs business decision-makers, in particular, hit the spot. When we started, we figured that customizing business software by ourselves was something we'd never be able to scale properly. So, instead, we wanted to create a community of developers and partners who know their target audience better than we do. This way, we focus on the core platform and search for these partners, who, for a cut, focus on their areas of expertise. Big competitors like ODOO, Zoho, and various local products use the same model.
Of course, as you mentioned, the pure approach didn't work well. The best clients we know are those we found by ourselves, even when we handed them off to the partners for actual developer work. But the big part was making the product customizable for the developers (including us!) in the first place because we essentially started to offer various products built on top of us that we could mix, match, and reuse.
Open-sourcing aims to attract the attention of these developers and partners by offering them a vast incentive compared to the products on the market: BYOServer and have it for free. With this, we massively cut our ability to profit from the cloud service but (hopefully!) create a community of contractors and companies who develop on our platform as their business model. With this, we create a market for the services based on our platform, and there are still lots of ways for us to profit from it with integrations, cloud offerings, and various value-added services.
Still, we continue to explore the marketing options as well — it's slow, but not as slow as before :)
Your other comments sound dispassionate about your product. It makes it sound like you are only interested in growing a company and not in solving problems for your customers. You said you arent interested in slowly growing a business that is currently making you money This is completely at odds with growing an open source community. Its typically one of the slowest and most thankless jobs you can do in software. nix…
I agree with you, building an open-source community is among the hardest things to do, true both for commercial and passion projects. And you said it, the amount of the developers willing to donate their time to an obscure F# codebase is probably close to zero. So the way I see it, open-sourcing for us is not a way to gain developers of our product, but the developers on our product.
Our "product" is technically a modular JavaScript + CustomQL platform which the partners are coding on to create or customize products for the target business. Similar to the other CRM/ERP platforms on the market, it locks them in with the amount of code and in-house knowledge that they have for the platform. And we are in a chicken-and-egg situation: without an existing base of integrations, partners and solutions for the end businesses, both prospective customers and partners see risks in the support and custom development costs that they are not willing to take.
We hope that open-sourcing (thus also giving the way to run the product on your own servers for free) gives potential partners a really sweet deal compared to the traditional cut-based cloud SaaS offerings, and can help us build a network of these partners and integrations that we need. And being a CRP/ERM platform, potential ways to monetize it are still aplenty (paid-for enhancements, integrations, cloud offerings etc).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would consider what kind of licensing you want to do, I would also consider goals in doing this. One huge benefit of an open source SaaS offering is the freedom to take control of what you're getting out of it in-house, or going straight to the vendor. We plan to put both back and front under Apache-2.0. It seems like a good enough way to show that the user won't depend on us. > Will you be offering migration to…
Are you okay with Amazon taking your code and setting up their own version of SaaS for it? Not saying it'd make financial sense for them, just that… once you open source it they can do what they want. Also remember that open sourcing something isn't a marketing panacea; you can still struggle to get people interested in it afterwards. It's a useful step if it calms your customers since they don't have to worry as muc…
* Requires a considerable amount of integrations, customizations, and other "stuff on top";
* Has huge fears about vendor lock-ins and the possibility of unforeseen migrations/support costs.
So yes, the idea is that allowing not only custom deployments, but competitor SaaS businesses built on top of it can raise the market for the added services. Whether that would really work this way or not is a question we'd be dying to know the answer for :D
A few thoughts: 1. Is your target customer a software developer? It seems like your customer would be a executive, perhaps at a smaller business. You want to get that person's attention. I think open-sourcing is more likely to get developer attention. 2. There are lots of other marketing strategies you could try (content-based marketing, going to tradeshows, cold calling, etc). 3. If you have existing customers, I th…
Thanks for the thoughts! Your thoughts on the developers vs business decision-makers, in particular, hit the spot. When we started, we figured that customizing business software by ourselves was something we'd never be able to scale properly. So, instead, we wanted to create a community of developers and partners who know their target audience better than we do. This way, we focus on the core platform and search for…
This is the meaning of the badly put advice "do things that don't scale".
Regarding your vision of offloading the work to partners, my experience is that more time can be put trying to convince prospective partners than doing the work yourself if you are not careful.
My feeling is that you are anticipating hyper growth a bit too much. Start by doing all this work yourself, and you'll have no problem to scale with the income you'll earn.
This is assuming you price your product appropriately so that you are profitable on every transaction and customer.