31–40 of 51 posts
Doesn't Locomotive help you acquire new clients?
You'll see huge changes on our sites very soon. We actually paused all our marketing efforts for a while to focus on development but it seems that it has to be our priority #1 right now.
I read this with interest as I'm a founder of another CMS - http://grabaperch.com - that I guess is a competitor (although we're PHP & MySQL). We launched in 2009, and have always been licensed on a commercial basis. This means that we've been able to bundle top notch support in with license fees, and continue to develop the product based on user feedback. I really love the idea of things being open source and there…
But that was a mistake and this led to the situation we are in right now. And of course, we can only offer limited support to our free users because it would just kill our business otherwise. We'll work on improving our onboarding process and be more agressive in terms of marketing to generate more revenues that every one will benefit from in the end.
I read this with interest as I'm a founder of another CMS - http://grabaperch.com - that I guess is a competitor (although we're PHP & MySQL). We launched in 2009, and have always been licensed on a commercial basis. This means that we've been able to bundle top notch support in with license fees, and continue to develop the product based on user feedback. I really love the idea of things being open source and there…
Thanks Rachel, I really appreciate your comment. When we introduced our very first paid services, we were very afraid to scare our open source community away and consequently, we were way too shy in our marketing efforts. But that was a mistake and this led to the situation we are in right now. And of course, we can only offer limited support to our free users because it would just kill our business otherwise. We'll…
We actually only hear from about 25% of our customers and only 10% raise more than one query, but if you take a look at our forum you'll see a lot of the support we get isn't even anything to do with our product. We're now experts in the horror that is shared PHP webhosting, we end up helping people with their CSS.
So we have a license fee that covers support. People can come into our forum and we'll help them out. As a business focused product that is massively important. If a designer has used Perch to create a site for their client and they have trouble adding the free blog add-on for example, they need to know they can come and ask us about it. That's the biggest difference between us and a "free" product, you get help when you need it.
If you have a product that is targeted squarely on the developer community, it is hard to monetize unless you are a platform (i.e. GitHub). On similar lines, Wordpress makes money from bloggers, not web designers, hence the "hosting" service is value for money.
Do you target end customers for LocomotiveCMS? Look at your hosting customers and see why they signed up for your hosting. Identify a niche and focus on marketing to that niche.
Blog posts like this will definitely help. Wish you all the best!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
A majority of those customers won't consider a "better wordpress", either because choosing wordpress is the safe option, or they are invested in the Wordpress ecosystem. The customer looking at the LocamotiveCMS webpage has probably already decided they want a better Wordpress, and they are trying to compare between the other options available. I'm not saying they shouldn't compare against Wordpress, but it wouldn't…
Whether this is 90%, 50%, or 1% of WordPress developers doesn't matter much. Even in the worst-case scenario it's still going to be a big enough niche if you're able to reach them.
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 h…
This is certainly true. Content management systems are a dime a dozen. Locomotive is nice, but others have more developers, features, mindshare, exposure etc. Hard to compete with that. Still, I believe Locomotive already serves a niche: It is one of the few available ruby on rails cm systems. And it it possible to integrate Locomotive with an existing rails app. That is why I guess their main audience is rails devel…
But you have to wonder, how do you monetize a community of coders who are already very competent (compared to the PHP ecosphere)?
I think an "App store" of sorts could be the way to go. Just take % cuts off of other's work, and foster it as it all grows organically. Imagine if WordPress had done that themselves... instead of Envato and the like killin it in what could rightfully have been WP's own backyard.
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 h…
This is certainly true. Content management systems are a dime a dozen. Locomotive is nice, but others have more developers, features, mindshare, exposure etc. Hard to compete with that. Still, I believe Locomotive already serves a niche: It is one of the few available ruby on rails cm systems. And it it possible to integrate Locomotive with an existing rails app. That is why I guess their main audience is rails devel…
That's a great point, and another illustration that a business model that works for one product might not work for another, even if they appear similar on the surface.
These usually come with automatic updates for a year for subscribers.
Sometimes this can be bundled with "priority support" for 3x the price.
And, of course, there's always the classic "upgrade to the pro version" pitch