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The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

locomotivecms.com

1–10 of 51 posts

Re: The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

#2
Considering why this happens, perhaps the issue is... paid support on a small personal project feels like cheating, even if it saves you tons of time and reduces headaches. I guess people take pride in knowing their software stack from top to bottom. For larger projects egos are put aside because the more important factor is reliability.

I don't have any answers of how to change things for your project, but hopefully this comment can be of some use.

Re: The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

#6
I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. My start-up (also roughly a CMS) is considering going open source to increase awareness and the size of our target market. We were also considering continuing to make money via a hosted solution, although their revenue numbers don't get me too excited about the prospect.

Re: The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

#8
post #3

Here's a marketing tip, your comparison page only compares to WordPress. "Better WordPress" doesn't impress me. Try comparing yourself to a better product. One that people are currently paying money for.

Millions of people pay money to wordpress developers, wordpress hosting companies, wordpress themers, wordpress plugin makers, etc. Wordpress runs half the web. I'd say building a better wordpress is a worthy goal.

Re: The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

#9
I'm curious whether the business model is truly the problem. While I'm sure LocomotiveCMS is a nice product, it's operating in a very crowded space with numerous and established open-source, proprietary, and hosted solutions. From the way it's described on your website, it doesn't seem particularly specialized and thus highly valuable to a niche of the marketplace.

I wonder what would happen if a) you focused v3 on having features that specifically made it awesome for dentists with HIPPA compliance issues. Or cross-eyed investment bankers. Or someone with deep pockets and an unusual, unmet need and b) shifted the value of open-source from shared development costs to risk-avoidance. Namely: customers have an escape hatch if you cease development because they can update the source, export data into novel data formats, etc.

Re: The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

#10
post #3

Here's a marketing tip, your comparison page only compares to WordPress. "Better WordPress" doesn't impress me. Try comparing yourself to a better product. One that people are currently paying money for.

Millions of people pay money to wordpress developers, wordpress hosting companies, wordpress themers, wordpress plugin makers, etc. Wordpress runs half the web. I'd say building a better wordpress is a worthy goal.

24% at last count, I believe.
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