rushabh

We build all our tools from customer support, CRM, billing, payroll to accounting -> https://erpnext.com. Its also open source, and would love more startups to use it. https://github.com/frappe/erpnext

The benefit of open sources is that you can build deep integration to your processes and also grow it as your company grows. With closed tools, you will end up paying a lot and also lose the opportunity to drive more team productivity by being unable hack and extend your tools.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Companies like Microsoft, Oracle, CISCO etc routinely lobby (a euphemism for kickbacks in kind) with governments in developing countries to corner big contracts.

These governments could invest a fraction of that money in open source tools and reap benefits for years to come. Unfortunately neither intent nor ability exists in these governments (including mine in India) to think for themselves.

"Outsourcing" covers a wide range of companies based on quality and pricing, so it depends on which end of the spectrum you are.

Unfortunately the people who end of migrating to the United States on an H1B do form the cream of developers. Infact Indian outsourcing companies use H1Bs as an incentive.

I for one, will be happy if the stakes are increased. This will ensure more smart people stay back in India and fix local problems.

SAAS founder here. Firstly congrats on such a great exit, you and your team certainly deserve it! I would love to know what "more fuel for our engines means"? How much cash you are you looking to burn? From most listed SAAS companies spend upward 80% on sales and marketing. Are you planning to do more enterprise sales?

> That site is horrible

That's an understatement. I wonder how can a site, that is so designed not to make you read anything, say anything of value.

Maybe they used AI to style the fonts? Train a neural network on a particular style (thickness, density, curvature) and then write out heuristics to generate new fonts based on other fonts, that get classified by a neural net. Let the bots do all the work. Might be an interesting article if the actually did that.

I totally agree. As a company, we lost two of our best engineers who emigrated to the US in the past year. And no, it was not because of the pay or working conditions or no equity. People have been sold the "American Dream" to people outside America over the decades. Young people have seen their relatives from previous generations live much better lives in the US over India.

Bringing people back will take time and I think once the infrastructure is fixed (which is very fixable in the next 10-15 years), most people will not think of emigrating. Having lived in the US and India, I think the society in India is as free as in the US, without the anxiety of "fitting in" and leaving your family behind. Also today you have access to the best products, technology and knowledge being in India so other than the physical infrastructure (housing, travel, cleanliness) the gap is much reduced.

I sincerely hope the immigration laws get tighter in the US so that we can build great companies, create wealth for the society, create jobs and remove hardship and poverty in India.

SAAS is a viable revenue model, but it takes a long time to scale. If you are looking at "lifestyle" business, you can still do open source and make make money too. Thats what we do at ERPNext

There still needs to be incentive to lower the cost. For example, to lower costs of clinical trials, companies can invest more in computer simulations and find other ways to reduce those costs. Also this might also force big pharma companies to collaborate more with each other rather than re creating the wheel.

styse, you are a great motivation for the product company I run. I checked your strategy page and you are planning to integrate with NetSuite. Why not something open source for finance? ERPNext?

disclaimer: I am the founder of erpnext

> I really haven't messed with ERPNext, mainly because I can't get it to install correctly.

Please post any issues, tracebacks on the forum. Install is pretty straightforward and works well for most people https://github.com/frappe/bench

Edit: You can also use the VM https://erpnext.com/download

Rushabh here from the ERPNext core team. ERPNext is mostly used by small businesses with 3-50 users and covers most use cases for accounting, inventory, sales, purchase and other functions. We estimate there are between 800-1000 businesses using ERPNext at the moment. These are mostly small businesses (non tech) in services, manufacturing, distribution and retail.

The project is reasonably stable, but still takes a bit to set it up. The community is quite active (https://discuss.erpnext.com) and there is a long list of things that need to be done (https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/issues)

It has a metadata based framework and has REST API's out of the box. Its never been discussed on HN, so would love to get feedback.

I am sure you have thought about it, but how about pricing it per language? It might be a good idea to price it at $50 per language.

Also the on-boarding is a bit difficult, I should be able to see a few words / phrases before I install a plugin. FYI I have never installed a plugin other than an Adblocker

I agree with the sentiment here, you spent a year and you learnt a lot out of it. Your co-founder would probably have to put in more money (maybe for a few more years) before she sees any profit, if any. So the risk is far greater on her side.

If this works, ask your co-founder to let you keep a small minority stake and the let her convert all her debt to equity.

This way, if that company does succeed, you will get some value out of it, and you will be recognized as a co-founder. If you just walk away with the "assets" (whatever they are worth), you may get some money, but a load of heartburn.

Brilliant! That just made me realize that borrowing creates surplus which in turn creates larger and deeper networks. That works really well for everyone if supply and demand are stable and no one gets very greedy. But if not, then things can go bad for everyone.

For example if Tom's stall does not work well, then the "cookie crumbles". Your mom, of course, being your mom will still give you cookies, no matter you did not make wise decisions earlier and you will still hold on to your incumbent position as a cookie distributor even though you don't deserve it anymore.

This goes on for a while, till people don't want your mom's cookies anymore because, all their moms have also started distributing cookies generously.

Then a new kid comes to your neighbourhood with an exciting new flavor of cookies and suddenly it seems cool to be having those cookies. Your mom, obviously does not like it and tries to out-law or regulate those cookies. But then, the train has already left the station.

There is also a nice php based simple accounting app for those looking for a slightly modern user interface.

http://webzash.org/ https://github.com/prashants/webzash

I think we are witnessing a massive de-centralization of economics. We seem to live in multi-tiered cellular societies that seem decoupled from one another. People living in the same city are experience vastly different trends with some are struggling, some are prospering.

Like how small startups are able to create value that usually needed large corporate structures, small trends are becoming powerful and independent. People are getting news from a large variety of sources and living in their own bubbles.

The new normal is that there is no normal. Those who are fearful and greedy are both right, but they no longer reside in the same world.

This is based on a policy document released a couple months back. Here is a better article http://opensource.com/government/15/8/india-adopts-open-sour...

In general, this is just intent. I am not sure how the government plans to implement this. Government in India is huge and complex and most of the arms run independently, which is great for IT services vendors like IBM, TCS and others since they make money by selling the same stuff over and over again.

People who I know and are working in various organizations with the government are pretty frustrated with the pace and lack of intent on the ground.

Most Indian FOSS projects like BOSS Linux are pretty lame and they don't have any real community behind them. I think they took down the forum on the BOSS linux website, because there were no questions asked. Some of the other "successful" services like Spoken Tutorials (http://spoken-tutorial.org/) are pretty bad too (though I see websites have improved).

As a tax paying Indian citizen, I really hope all this changes.

As someone who has been developing using Javascript for 10 years and has seen many frameworks comes and go (including authoring one), this looks refreshingly good on first impressions. Far better than coffeescript or React. Congrats!

Plus, I love the fact that the syntax looks Pythonic :)

It is not to hard to make living off open source for a solo or very small team of developers. There are many revenue models around open source and they have been documented elsewhere. They include providing services like hosting (Wordpress.com) to support (RedHat), plugins (SugarCRM) and "Enterprise" editions (GitLab)

But each of the approaches requires that you get serious traction.

The key here is to stay independent of revenue for the longest time as you can. This is only possible if you are willing to work as a solo developer, working part-time till you hit certain traction numbers.

Open source is a hard and long game as a business. On the plus side, it is very satisfying and if you are able to sustain. There are many domains where open source is already winning big (OS, infrastructure, databases, web) and as new areas "fall" to open source, the risk on the closed-source side will also keep on increasing.

I manage a small open source project (https://github.com/frappe/erpnext) that churns 100+k per year and helps me manage a small team. It took me 4-5 years to reach here. We make money by providing hosting and also help to other developers working on our platform.

I would start with a services plan and a beautiful website. If you are not a designer, do hire one. Good design and quality can go a very long way towards achieving your dream.

If your project is an app, you can also go the SAAS (softare-as-a-service) way. But beware, building a multi-tenant platform, and working on user onboarding, marketing your site can be 2x to 3x of your original project your project.

The good thing is that once you are there, 1/2 years is a reasonable time, this will only grow.

Looks neat, why not open it up for the community? Your site design just begs for a "Fork Me on GitHub" link.

Plug: Also checkout ERPNext https://erpnext.com

We just released a new version couple of weeks back.

Along with building customer engagement it is important to build a brand. The brand becomes a gateway to other services like certification, training and consulting.

For an open source OEM, a brand is obvious, but for a community player, it is not so intuitive. The brand is built by focusing on contribution, good writing (blogs, articles etc) and showing visibility on the forum. Like the OP mentioned, you cannot be too invested in the IP as a non-core player.

You need to find open source projects that suit your interest and you have a genuine passion in seeing them succeed. Look beyond the highly successful ones, and look for projects that have a reasonable community + momentum but are not very famous. There is a lot to be done for such projects

Try https://github.com/explore

Plug: Checkout our project https://github.com/frappe/erpnext

I will take it one step further. Enterprise software is designed to "sell". In enterprise software, the buyer and the user are not the same person and the buyer has the power. That is why enterprise software sales is so bloated.

We build and sell enterprise software and our strength is design. The way we work around this problem is that we are selling only to early adopters and have also open sourced our product. We are not getting the big bucks, but its starting to show result.

I am the founder of another open source project (https://erpnext.com) and we monetize from the end-user (non-developer community). This is the community which values hosting services else they would need a third party to host your product. If you identify that group, they are more likely to trust your service rather than go with someone else.

If you have a product that is targeted squarely on the developer community, it is hard to monetize unless you are a platform (i.e. GitHub). On similar lines, Wordpress makes money from bloggers, not web designers, hence the "hosting" service is value for money.

Do you target end customers for LocomotiveCMS? Look at your hosting customers and see why they signed up for your hosting. Identify a niche and focus on marketing to that niche.

Blog posts like this will definitely help. Wish you all the best!

The number now is 400. Anyways its a good time for developers in India and I am sure they won't waste much time finding new jobs.

Sure will write it up sometime. We could do with some HN love :)

We make around 150k with our open source project too and there is no commercial license. Our revenue is from cloud and developer support. Maybe we should write a blog around that (https://erpnext.com)