Ask HN: How can we open-source a 7 year old SaaS codebase and build a community?

The platform for us is almost as much a developer-targeted product as it's a business-targeted product. It gives a developer a relatively easy but quite flexible way of building business apps of all kinds, and modular, so it can be reused later. And the more one builds on it, the more incentive they have for keeping on the platform and the larger potential costs of migration. We also offer modules for free to build upon.

The CRM/ERP consultancies usually have cuts from the license fees of the SaaS products they develop on (we are currently no exception). What we want to offer instead is for them to effectively collect the SaaS fees themselves if they host, easily offer "cheap" on-prem installations and give assurance both to them and their clients about the vendor lock-in issues. This may bring more and more development companies, which grows the amount of integrations and solutions on the market, which creates a loop. Finally, the end businesses don't pick CRMs; they pick a consultant who picks a CRM for them.

We still see enough ways to monetize the product if it takes off this way. The question is whether our reasoning holds true.

That's a good way to put it. We also have an opposite fear: that building and customizing for the end clients requires expertise and focus on a particular market. This way we quickly become "just another CRM consultancy" which happens to have their own in-house product, and limits their growth to the (relatively) narrow market they are good at. Competing for new niches with the platforms that focus on building the partner networks becomes hard, considering all the ecosystem that these platforms develop around them. We have experience at running a successful MS Dynamics consultancy like that before, but this was its limit for us.

Whether our understanding on how to balance these two extremes is adequate is a good question that we keep pondering on. So thanks for the input!

This is so true. Early on, I tried to sell our product through a system integrator channel. I hoped they would "do the sales for us." The systems integrator was super focused on sales, they talked to our target customer all the time, and they seemed super excited to sell our product.

But, it was a total flop. They didn't really seem to understand our product, and they would say anything to close a deal. Sometimes we did a lot of work, then got cut from the deal late in the game. More often, we ended up in the deal, but then had to deal with promises to the customer that didn't make any sense. It was like "the integrator said it would do what?"

I agree that you have to be really careful about selling through partners. Interestingly, the integrator channel was primarily for another, much larger software company. I told the CEO how excited we were to partner with the integrators. He looked at me and said "oh, we wish we could get rid of the integrators, but its too late because they control access to the customers." Luckily, we were small enough that walking away from the integrators worked for us.

If I were you, I would focus on identifying a few verticals where your product works well (say, car dealerships), then try to figure out how to sell to them. What are their concerns? What drives their decisions? How can you contact the right person to pitch your product? etc. If you can build a system around a vertical, you will feel so much better about sales. And once you build a system around one vertical, you can start looking for additional verticals to target.