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The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

locomotivecms.com

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

#41

Post by Cthulhu_ »

girvo wrote: post #22
georgestephanis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it seems a lot of the comparisons to WordPress are hardly accurate. Most notably is the 'Security' area where it asserts that > There are a million plugins available that extend your site’s functionality, but each plugin increases your security risk and your maintenance overhead. but with LocomotiveCMS > Since LocomotiveCMS is built on Ruby on Rails, you get tons of power without having to rely on a bunch of pl…

I've worked with Wordpress for the last 7 years myself, and some of these points aren't too far off the mark. I'm of the belief that I shouldn't have to install a million plugins for stuff that should be built in, and I'm sick of the global loop. On the other hand the module system and Laravel integration I've built at work makes Wordpress rather nice to use for heavy development; clients can build new pages from scr…

But who gets to decide what "should be" built in? Chrome (the browser) for example came out with pretty much nothing but browsing at first, while its competitors - Firefox and Opera, notably - were only adding features (iirc Opera had things like email, bittorrent and IRC clients built in at the time). This left the choice of what a user would like in his browser to that user himself.

I'm sure that most Wordpress installations have no extra plugins at all - and are none the worse off for it.

But out of curiosity - what plugins do you believe should be part of the default WP package?

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

#42

Post by iagooar »

I have worked for a company that did / does a lot of money by providing a closed-source CMS for mainly Rails apps to its clients.

I must say that getting paying customers for any CMS is a lot of work.

If you are going for larger companies, you need to have an entire sales department that is going to try selling your product together with customized solution.

Actually, what worked best for that company was selling a licensed CMS + consulting and building really customized solutions.

Maybe your business could work out this way too, but with an open-source model at the core. You could extend the open source version with some enterprisy features, charge for it and offer support and consultancy in order to build truly customized solutions.

Still, the really tricky part, is selling the product in a market that is pretty crowded by now.

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

#43

Post by lurcio »

elafforgue wrote: post #32

Estelle from LocomotiveCMS here. Thanks everyone for the comments! We're in full agreement agreement that we need to improve our marketing, many thanks for the suggestions. 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.

Even with my dev hat on I'd say marketing should always be top priority :-)

Go for low-hanging fruit. This may stimulate office discussion

http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/how-wordpress-makes-...

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

#44

Post by ZenoArrow »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #41
girvo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with Wordpress for the last 7 years myself, and some of these points aren't too far off the mark. I'm of the belief that I shouldn't have to install a million plugins for stuff that should be built in, and I'm sick of the global loop. On the other hand the module system and Laravel integration I've built at work makes Wordpress rather nice to use for heavy development; clients can build new pages from scr…

But who gets to decide what "should be" built in? Chrome (the browser) for example came out with pretty much nothing but browsing at first, while its competitors - Firefox and Opera, notably - were only adding features (iirc Opera had things like email, bittorrent and IRC clients built in at the time). This left the choice of what a user would like in his browser to that user himself. I'm sure that most Wordpress ins…

Opera has always been a little different (I personally like it), but Firefox was not getting tons of extra features when Chrome launched (why would Mozilla do that when they had such a healthy plugin market).

As far as I see it, Chrome got the bulk of its market share through speed and advertising/bundling (advertised on Google, bundled with Flash, etc...).

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

#45

Post by jordanlev »

One recommendation for you: I wanted to try out this CMS after reading the blog post, so I click on the "Get Started" link on your website... it requires me to subscribe to an email list?! Huge stumbling block there. There are SO many CMS's out there, and if I can't get a feel for it within a few minutes I'm going to just move on to the next one.

As a developer, I'm looking for easy-to-find docs. Having it in a downloadable PDF is already not so great... having to register for it is terrible.

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

#46

Post by elafforgue »

malditojavi wrote: post #28
Matti wrote: post #16

"Our only monetization strategy so far has been LocomotiveHosting. We had big hopes for it, but it has gained little traction and too little interest from our users." http://suckysales.locomotivehosting.com

So true, overall #2. There is room of improving the conversion rate. Also what's a 'non white label' hosting but with a custom domain?

There sure is and these comments will definitely be taken into consideration in our website makeover.

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

#47

Post by elafforgue »

sgdesign wrote: post #38
davidroetzel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is why I guess their main audience is rails developers who need some content management functionality in their apps. And those do not need hosting. 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.

That is correct, a vast majority of our users are Rails developers and we don't have a paid product for them right now. So we'll have to reach larger audiences for the hosting and find a good product for our early adopters. It's not so easy to combine both and that makes our website copy not as clear as it should be.

We're trying to talk to Rails developers because they are the most likely to see the technical possibilities of the product and to other developers because they are more likely to use our hosting solution. And we also insist on the free and open source side of the business while trying to monetize the project.

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

#48

Post by elafforgue »

rushabh wrote: post #35

I am the founder of another open source project ( https://erpnext.com ) and we monetize from the end-user (non-developer community). This is the community which values hosting services else they would need a third party to host your product. If you identify that group, they are more likely to trust your service rather than go with someone else. If you have a product that is targeted squarely on the developer communit…

No, we don't target the end customers. Though V3 and it's new user interface is definitely aimed as making content editing way more fun for them.

You know, at first if felt really good talking to developers and trying to solve their problems rather than having to provide support to non technical people.

But we are indeed considering serving a niche we think is underserved and that would actually need only a fraction of the features we've developed. That would be a more manageable project though I hate the idea of letting down our early adopters and all the people who believe in Locomotive.

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

#49

Post by elafforgue »

iagooar wrote: post #42

I have worked for a company that did / does a lot of money by providing a closed-source CMS for mainly Rails apps to its clients. I must say that getting paying customers for any CMS is a lot of work. If you are going for larger companies, you need to have an entire sales department that is going to try selling your product together with customized solution. Actually, what worked best for that company was selling a l…

It seems like we're heading in that direction. One thing that LocomotiveCMS did bring us is clients who need a custom CMS. In most cases, they'll start from some of Locomotive features and we build whatever they need from there. These are usually high quality clients though it means that we have way less time to devote to the open source version.

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

#50

Post by elafforgue »

jordanlev wrote: post #45

One recommendation for you: I wanted to try out this CMS after reading the blog post, so I click on the "Get Started" link on your website... it requires me to subscribe to an email list?! Huge stumbling block there. There are SO many CMS's out there, and if I can't get a feel for it within a few minutes I'm going to just move on to the next one. As a developer, I'm looking for easy-to-find docs. Having it in a downl…

I understand your concern. To be honest, until a year ago, we didn't have a CTA on our homepage. We opted for that solution that was meant to be temporary and that should have been replaced by a demo website. And this is one of the many projects that was postponed because we needed to speed up product development.

But once more, this proves that we should pause product development for a while (the only thing that Didier really likes to do) and focus on onboarding, good marketing and a good demo of the product.

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