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I'm hopeful that by doing so it will: 1) Grow it into a Wordpress size juggernaut with a plugin for any business process under the sun. 2) Bring me interesting consulting gigs.
The open-source site is at stockor.org. There's a demo up at stockor.com/demo as well.
Looking forward to hearing HN's thoughts!
You can make a ton of money in the ERP business, even if your product isn't very good. So if you're losing hope that stockor.com is going to bring in serious money anytime soon, it's probably because you need to focus way more on your onboarding experience and quality of the stockor.com website.
"It's 11 o'clock in the morning, do you know where your inventory is?" and I'm reading the page at 11 o'clock? Creepy
Everything looks very polished, I've never worked with an ERP before but I didn't know it could include your customer-facing website and process orders directly. I guess that's what ERP is for...
The demo doesn't look bad, but it seems to suffer from design-by-programmer. It also seems like the stockor.com website is more of an afterthought, even though it's a critical part of your sales funnel (other ERP vendors can afford to have a lousy website because they do face-to-face sales). You can make a ton of money in the ERP business, even if your product isn't very good. So if you're losing hope that stockor.co…
I haven't lost hope on stockor.com at all. I'm hoping that the open-source version will drive additional attention to stockor.com and I'll pick up more customers from it.
The basic problem I've ran into is credibility with customers. They're understandably reluctant to trust their entire business to some guy over the internet. I believe that if I can point out that the code is open and they can always migrate to running it themselves it should alleviate their reluctance.
Really it's kind of a no-brainer to pay me to host it at a few hundred a month vs hiring an IT guy.
Is it a coincidence that the page says "It's 11 o'clock in the morning, do you know where your inventory is?" and I'm reading the page at 11 o'clock? Creepy Everything looks very polished, I've never worked with an ERP before but I didn't know it could include your customer-facing website and process orders directly. I guess that's what ERP is for...
Thanks for the kind words! Once I get it all finalized I'm also hopping for additional plugins to extend it way beyond ERP. Time trackers - I'm looking at you.
The demo stuff was laking good test data on most pages. That was my initial thought.
The demo doesn't look bad, but it seems to suffer from design-by-programmer. It also seems like the stockor.com website is more of an afterthought, even though it's a critical part of your sales funnel (other ERP vendors can afford to have a lousy website because they do face-to-face sales). You can make a ton of money in the ERP business, even if your product isn't very good. So if you're losing hope that stockor.co…
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that that's a 100% accurate assessment, since well, it was designed by programmer. I haven't lost hope on stockor.com at all. I'm hoping that the open-source version will drive additional attention to stockor.com and I'll pick up more customers from it. The basic problem I've ran into is credibility with customers. They're understandably reluctant to trust their entire business to som…
People can spend plenty of time arguing the merits of those frameworks, but they were pretty much built for guys like you who are programmers and could use opinionated UI that's passed review in someone's design department. Use a theme/skinning site like bootswatch.com to throw in some variety with colors/typography and still have some thought put in the small details like "what should be the relative difference between your font sizes?"
Between your personal branding and the impressions created by first glances at your product, you can have some easy wins with credibility.
Having a 2 second look at the demo, it looks like a lot of useful kit. But what makes this different to other software, or indeed compared to Shopify and the like?
Stockor handles the entire supply chain from purchasing inventory to managing it and customer relations. You'd use Stockor to manage all your business processes behind the scenes.
Now that stocker's open-source I'd expect someone to write a shopify adapter for it. I've got an Amazon one already written that I'll be releasing soon.
Key questions I would immediately ask an ERP vendor that I do not see answered on your homepage:
- What kind of interfaces/APIs does Stockor provide? Both for in-house systems (analytics, whatever) as well as externals (EDIFACT, etc.).
- Is there some sort of pricing engine to fully calculate an order? How flexible is it?
I assume this is US only? If not, then what about languages, currencies, etc?