Placemark is going open source and shutting down
macwright.com
macwright.com
Any chance you could give more info on the size of enterprise customer you were looking at? I've had many people coming to me and only very rarely the rate per hour once you consider everything is more interesting than getting a 9to5 anywhere else.
source: 20% of my income come from sales that relates to my OSS software and I hope one day to get to 100% so I can focus 100% of my time on it
>And hopping is getting tedious.
I think life is pretty good if all I have to do is set a reminder to click a few buttons.
If you know what size user base you have and can estimate usage, buying ahead of time makes sense.
If you're smaller or can't afford a multi-year contract or don't want to get locked into one service, then "pay as you go" makes sense.
Mythical Man Month lays it out crystal clear that you want the smallest team possible, levered up to the hilt and retained long term, because communication overhead between people and teams is the dominant cost factor in orgs of all sizes. The optimal team size is two, given sufficient leverage. SaaS is the leverage.
I’m in a small business that pays much more per person for mapping software :)
(10 person team, probably £8k per year spend)
You're not a target customer.
I'm surprised this software is only $20/user-mth. This isn't "general" software. It solves a specific problem for a specific set of customers - it should be charging way more and going the enterprise route.
You mention a $20 customer. Look at pricing of Google workspaces or Office.
https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-al...
Version pricing was beneficial to indie builders because users didn't consider the source. (Office still offers that $149 level version pricing.)
Subscription pricing indies try to charge more, often multiples, relative to enterprise incumbents, so anyone who can ship at scale, can make the market unfeasible for indie entrants.
What happens is boutique buyers of indie subs, but not the mass market scale because it's too much to get all the users.
This is a common mistake in understanding pricing. The reason Office (or consumer apps like Spotify & Netflix) are able to be relatively cheaper is because their addressable market is vastly larger. Larger markets support lower prices, where the winners still end up earning more revenue.
By contrast, smaller niche markets have fewer potential customers over which to amortize their wares. This means that all things equal, those applications will tend to cost more.
As a reductio thought experiment, consider that anyone can buy Microsoft's newest OS, the product of many tens of billions of dollars of R&D, for less than the cost of a tailored suit. But suppose you needed to buy an OS that would only ever run on 50 devices worldwide, how much do you think that would cost?
Your explanation ought to be true either way, but it isn't.
And it doesn't have to be a thought experiment, there remains just enough single purchase software around to check.
That's because except for "artisanal", "boutique", or "Veblen" products, the user doesn't care about your costs, they care about their utility (and for Veblen, the cost is its utility).
Goes back to my initial comment: there are a misleading number of buyers willing to pay too much to "support the artist", as I do in software. But that is a very small addressable market relative to those who will pay for their utility, but not for your failure to scale.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Could you provide some examples?
Also I should have added the caveat that I'm talking about sustainable pricing models.
Yes, there are lots of small companies that don't yet understand how much they need to charge in order to thrive long-term. Those are not great counter-examples, because they represent a creator subsidizing her customers. That can only last so long.
Still, releasing it is already much better than 98% of companies in this space, and I'd definitely be inclined to use other products by this person because of it.
He seems like the type of guy to be willing to reasonable and considerate like this.
But hopefully not before it is too late. We should all think about situations where we are no longer around. Like having your keys/passwords at a notary.
I'm not so sure about that. An actively developed/supported project is often more useful than an abandoned open source one.
Arguably industry is always willing to pay, in aggregate, the cost for free software to be maintained, but is not willing to pay, despite the optimism of those who sell it, for the marginal utility it gives them per-customer (which should be much higher). When asked to do so they will simply support free-as-in-beer or cheaper alternatives until one of those becomes the dominant player. This is why successful and heavily commercialized free software projects often seem to be only just clinging on to profitability (eg Docker).
Are you saying that if you can pay someone to develop their proprietary code for a price you can necessarily find someone to accept the same amount of money for the same work but open sourced? That doesn't seem true. Those are not equivalent offers.
I would assume some people (clearly a minority) would be willing to take a small pay cut when working on FLOSS.
E.G. could someone be paid slightly less at GitLab versus the same role at GitHub, if they believe in GitLab's principles
If there isn't then the original commercial company was obviously never viable either.
Since an entity getting payment for maintenance can neither expect to collect a monopoly rent for the code, nor is required to pay one to anyone else, the cost of maintenance becomes the market price.
Especially when you start talking about a single person company, it could be as simple as the founder being sentimentally attached to the company and continuing it despite making less than they could with other opportunities, but that doesn't mean that if the founder gets hit by a bus someone else will also be willing to take a sub-optimal gig. Or a company might currently be barely worth running with $20k a month in revenue, but if there is a period of turmoil and lost customers in the process of open-sourcing/founder getting hit by a bus/whatever that now the customer base would only bring in $10k a month, it's no longer profitable, and the market fails to find someone to run the company.
Maybe Colin should make tarsnap free for bus drivers? ;)
That's not really the problem. The problem is that it lowers the company value: why should I, potential acquirer, shell out $$$ to get your IP, when I can just sit down and wait for it to come down the river?
And there's no guarantee the other acquirers will cooperate. "Why should I wait for the company to collapse and open source it's stuff forcing me to compete with other acquirers when I can buy them now and get a monopoly?"
The source code is part of a startup’s IP. When a startup fails the IP goes to the investors and debtors who can try to recoup some of their investment by selling the IP.
By the time a company fails, the source code isn’t really theirs to give away any more. They have to hand it over to investors. It’s the same reason a failing startup can’t just give away all of their office furniture or other assets.
Even if we ignore that, releasing source code doesn’t actually do anything for most customers of a SaaS platform. They were paying for the service, not the source code. The source code wasn’t designed for individual use, so self-hosting isn’t going to make sense. Maybe some other group would try to run a company around it, but if the first company failed to become sustainable with the source code it’s less likely that a second company would.
>Writing for the Hacker News audience makes my writing worse.
Yeah, understandable.
I can absolutely understand startup founders who are a bit spiteful and don't want to give away for free what nobody was interested in buying from them.
There's lots of things I'd use at $n but wouldn't use at $10n
And the corollary of this - if open source didn't exist, the result wouldn't be me paying for lots more products - it would be using lots less products.
Certainly - the advent of paywalls has meant that I mainly don't read those sources. Even the more affordable ones come with a mental tax of deciding to subscribe/cancel, remembering to renew/cancel etc...
But I'd be curious to see the source once it's released, for sure.
I myself am not interested on any proprietary offerings at this point; this has no relation to any qualities of the proprietary product. It could be awesome for all I know
The people to whom it is valuable are already paying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
Amazingly, there is still a really cool 90's website at https://www.staroffice.com ! You can even buy a neolithic version of StarOffice!
Been playing around with it for the last couple of months and have been delighted with it :)
Thanks for building it!
Pretty nice looking product and robust feature set. Love to see GIS tooling becoming more accessible.
It is the kind of post that would make me trust the founder to become a customer of their next project.
My coop has been working with something resembling to placemark: https://cocarto.com but our business model is not to sell it as a SaaS (which is always very difficult, and requires a lot of capital to reach enough customers) but sell a service to companies and administration around it. That’s why it’s FOSS from the beginning.
This doesn't work for everyone, some startups can't afford to put two thirds of the resources on providing support. I think it's sad that there usually no middle way to structure your business with FOSS in mind.
And yes, I’m frustrated that living from doing FOSS is hard. And it is also hard to spend only 1 day/week to do smaller contributions…
I haven't checked if it was the case, but organisation type of license with a pack of users could have worked well.
The first year's supply of hits isn't free, but it's pretty cheap if you cheat a bit, and you figure since you're cheating a bit it will be cheap forever so why not get hooked!?
I'm not saying it's bad, just I've worked at some places that do this and you know the company they are doing it to know they're doing it, but accepting it at the moment.
I wouldn't call it very specialised. Seems like a fairly general tool for visualising and manipulating GeoJSON and similar data? I actually need to create/manipulate a GeoJSON data set myself for a current project, so I think I'll try this out!
I understand every startup wants to have a killer feature which creates unique selling proposition, but this seems like something that probably took way too much effort and wasn't really demanded. But this is only my assumption.
Better source: https://www.placemark.io/post/placemark-is-winding-down
<script>try {
if (document.referrer) {
const ref = new URL(document.referrer);
if (ref.host === 'news.ycombinator.com') {
window.location.href = 'https://google.com/';
}
}
} catch (e) { }
</script>It seems to be a filter curate out those who aren't interested or curious enough or able to problem solve why that redirect happened, and how to circumvent it - a low bar but could filter out a lot of noise.
I can't trigger that redirect on Firefox or Chromium browsers, though. It seems HN puts a `noreferrer` on the link.
Edit: After reading the reasoning at https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news I'm a little more sympathetic, but there's got to be a better way to handle this.
Or have I not been paying enough attention, and this already happened?
While I appreciate them releasing their stuff at all, why do companies usually also shut down at the same time as they are gaining a really cool differentiator over their competitors?
Giving up is the first step to success. That's when you stop trying and start doing.
The story of the failing company taking a moonshot or making risky bets is pretty common.
This sounds like something that there'd be an HBS logo on, it likely already exists. It's a fairly easy thesis project.
There's an LLM that does conceptual searching of scholarly literature https://consensus.app/search/ but it looks like just a classic IDF/bag of words style approach labeled "ML"
* I can't make enough money out of it
* do I keep this as a side project?
* if yes: development mostly stops
* if no: OK, shut down
* now that I don't fear competition, I can Open Source it
(not commenting on how valid each of these is, which is probably very hard to judge without the founder's perspective).
> [Chatwoot] was a product we started building in 2017. It failed due to a couple of obvious reasons. [...] It was in an inactive mode for around 1 and a half years. Recently we thought of putting it out instead of letting the code to rust. Our idea is to make it something like Gitlab/Mattermost where people can host their own version and we will provide a hosted version for people who don't want to self-host.
> After we open-sourced, we received contributions from 30 developers all around the world.
And then they proceeded to raise $1.6 million in seed round.
- doing consulting work on the side
- living off savings
- having a spouse with income
For bootstrapped companies in the software or SaaS space without employees there should be minimal start-up costs compared to say, opening a restaurant. The real loss is opportunity costs: what salary or equity you could have earned as an alternative.