Ask HN: Is whitelabeling your software a good idea?

18 points·pixelfeeder··4 comments

I’ve been getting a handful of requests of people who loved http://upstart.me and asked if I was planning to whitelabel it. Has anyone here whitelabeled their project?.

What are the pros and cons?

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How / why do they want to white label it? Do they already have sales/marketing channels established?

If it's a good fit for your business, white labeling is a fantastic business model.

The largest benefit is having other people investing their time and dollars selling and marketing your product for you.

You have to think carefully about what you decide to offer though, for example someone else in this thread mentioned custom domains.

It's very easy to get sucked into custom development for someone over promises but ultimately doesn't execute on distribution well enough to justify your time building the feature.

I did it a couple of times. The pros are that you’re in a better position to sell to businesses. The cons are that the implementation can get a little bit tricky if you want to enable custom domains.

What is whitelabeling?

White labeling is when you take your product and slap a label for another company on it, and the company sells it as their own. So I could buy 40,000 Bluetooth speakers from BlamCo in China and get them labeled as “BLEATS PILL” and sell them as if they were my own. My company is in the process of selling some white label stuff which means we can charge more (in our case at least) than if we retain our labeling on the hardware.

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