Comment by ttcbj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ttcbj | Hacker News Reader

A few thoughts:

1. Is your target customer a software developer? It seems like your customer would be a executive, perhaps at a smaller business. You want to get that person's attention. I think open-sourcing is more likely to get developer attention.

2. There are lots of other marketing strategies you could try (content-based marketing, going to tradeshows, cold calling, etc).

3. If you have existing customers, I think you really need to work with them on in-depth case studies that explain why they benefited from choosing your solution. You should also see if you can market to other, similar customers.

4. "customizable by any developer" - That developer should be you. This I have personal experience with. We initially delivered a product and left it to the customer to configure. Later, we discovered that customizing the product for the customer delivered better results, better relationships, and allowed us to learn about our own product and our customers.

Anyway, I would do a lot of sales/marketing brainstorming before I open sourced. It seems you see it as a marketing strategy, but I think you should consider other avenues first. Good luck!

Thanks for the thoughts!

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 :)

>When we started, we figured that customizing business software by ourselves was something we'd never be able to scale properly

This is the meaning of the badly put advice "do things that don't scale".

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.

My feeling is that you are anticipating hyper growth a bit too much. Start by doing all this work yourself, and you'll have no problem to scale with the income you'll earn.

This is assuming you price your product appropriately so that you are profitable on every transaction and customer.

> 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!

> can be put trying to convince prospective partners

This is so true. Early on, I tried to sell our product through a system integrator channel. I hoped they would "do the sales for us." The systems integrator was super focused on sales, they talked to our target customer all the time, and they seemed super excited to sell our product.

But, it was a total flop. They didn't really seem to understand our product, and they would say anything to close a deal. Sometimes we did a lot of work, then got cut from the deal late in the game. More often, we ended up in the deal, but then had to deal with promises to the customer that didn't make any sense. It was like "the integrator said it would do what?"

I agree that you have to be really careful about selling through partners. Interestingly, the integrator channel was primarily for another, much larger software company. I told the CEO how excited we were to partner with the integrators. He looked at me and said "oh, we wish we could get rid of the integrators, but its too late because they control access to the customers." Luckily, we were small enough that walking away from the integrators worked for us.

If I were you, I would focus on identifying a few verticals where your product works well (say, car dealerships), then try to figure out how to sell to them. What are their concerns? What drives their decisions? How can you contact the right person to pitch your product? etc. If you can build a system around a vertical, you will feel so much better about sales. And once you build a system around one vertical, you can start looking for additional verticals to target.

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