> Regarding your vision of offloading the work to partners, my experience is that more time can be put trying to convince prospective partners than doing the work yourself if you are not careful.
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!
Hey, thanks for chipping in! Let me try to answer these questions.
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.
I'll add to the MarkinK's reply: the idea is that CRM/ERP target audience:
* Requires a considerable amount of integrations, customizations, and other "stuff on top";
* Has huge fears about vendor lock-ins and the possibility of unforeseen migrations/support costs.
So yes, the idea is that allowing not only custom deployments, but competitor SaaS businesses built on top of it can raise the market for the added services. Whether that would really work this way or not is a question we'd be dying to know the answer for :D
Funny that you mention Nix, because our infrastructure is actually completely NixOS-based. But that's only because I was (and am!) a huge fan of it, and it keeps the amount of people needed to manage our infra at one ;)
I agree with you, building an open-source community is among the hardest things to do, true both for commercial and passion projects. And you said it, the amount of the developers willing to donate their time to an obscure F# codebase is probably close to zero. So the way I see it, open-sourcing for us is not a way to gain developers of our product, but the developers on our product.
Our "product" is technically a modular JavaScript + CustomQL platform which the partners are coding on to create or customize products for the target business. Similar to the other CRM/ERP platforms on the market, it locks them in with the amount of code and in-house knowledge that they have for the platform. And we are in a chicken-and-egg situation: without an existing base of integrations, partners and solutions for the end businesses, both prospective customers and partners see risks in the support and custom development costs that they are not willing to take.
We hope that open-sourcing (thus also giving the way to run the product on your own servers for free) gives potential partners a really sweet deal compared to the traditional cut-based cloud SaaS offerings, and can help us build a network of these partners and integrations that we need. And being a CRP/ERM platform, potential ways to monetize it are still aplenty (paid-for enhancements, integrations, cloud offerings etc).
Your thoughts on the developers vs business decision-makers, in particular, hit the spot. When we started, we figured that customizing business software by ourselves was something we'd never be able to scale properly. So, instead, we wanted to create a community of developers and partners who know their target audience better than we do. This way, we focus on the core platform and search for these partners, who, for a cut, focus on their areas of expertise. Big competitors like ODOO, Zoho, and various local products use the same model.
Of course, as you mentioned, the pure approach didn't work well. The best clients we know are those we found by ourselves, even when we handed them off to the partners for actual developer work. But the big part was making the product customizable for the developers (including us!) in the first place because we essentially started to offer various products built on top of us that we could mix, match, and reuse.
Open-sourcing aims to attract the attention of these developers and partners by offering them a vast incentive compared to the products on the market: BYOServer and have it for free. With this, we massively cut our ability to profit from the cloud service but (hopefully!) create a community of contractors and companies who develop on our platform as their business model. With this, we create a market for the services based on our platform, and there are still lots of ways for us to profit from it with integrations, cloud offerings, and various value-added services.
Still, we continue to explore the marketing options as well — it's slow, but not as slow as before :)
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!