Thoughts on selling source code (Shopify and Quickbooks style web app) | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on selling source code (Shopify and Quickbooks style web app)

6 pointsbrendaningram10 comments

I've been working on this product in various forms for 20 years. It's never been a commercial product. It's effectively site building (e.g. Wix or Squarespace) plus e-commerce (e.g. Shopify or BigCommerce) plus accounting (e.g. Xero or Quickbooks) in the one app. Whenever I've run a business that required e-commerce and accounting I've been frustrated by having to use 2 different platforms and subscriptions, so I intended to write my own. Unfortunately I have lost interest in coding (20 years as a working software engineer) and I'd like to either sell the code or give it to someone that has the means and motivation to take it to market. I have no interest in any ongoing royalty or ownership. If anyone has thoughts on this, people that may be interested, advice... I'm all ears. Thanks :)

Unfortunately, selling source code is very hard. And the market for site builders is very saturated. But it’s hard to say in your case without having seen your product.

I agree. I'm happy to open source it, and will likely end up doing so.

Hello Brendan. I've been working full time on an e-commerce site building monolith for the past year and I now have gray hair, not from age. I think I would benefit greatly from meeting you, for advice if anything.

Sure thing. Feel free to get in touch and we can chat :)

open source it and document it well. itll prove whether your library is valuable enough to others to leverage. You can put up a donation button for a buck. Selling the source of a tool to someone whos never used it is basically impossible. You need to garner interest first.

alternatively come up with a payment model that allows users to get familiarized for free and then commit to pay when they want some niceties, although you said youre done coding so i doubt youll want to put in that work.

Good advice, thanks :)

Very cool! What stack did you use?

It's Go on the backend, Postgres DB, Go HTML templates, a bit of jQuery but otherwise everything uses pure JS. It was (and is intended to be) deployed to AWS, and uses SES for notifications and S3 for client storage (e.g. uploading product images).

Why not open source it?

That is definitely an option, and I am completely happy to do that.

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