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The most prominent company doing this model now is Automattic. Most other SaaS companies run tons of open source... EXCEPT for the core product. I would like to
by cycloptic 7y ago
The most prominent company doing this model now is Automattic. Most other SaaS companies run tons of open source... EXCEPT for the core product. I would like to stop this trend; self-hosting is not a problem but instead an opportunity to upsell. It's true though that YC founders in general do not seem to believe this and would rather build the same moat that everyone else is building. Even if it creates practical problems when going over to different markets, as seen in the article.
- flyinglizard 7y agoTo the best of my knowledge, Automattic followed the success of the Wordpress open source project. It's an attempt to monetize an existing open source platform. The same goes for Docker, Elastic and others. The open source platform came first, then came the services. Broadly speaking, I don't know why software is singled out in its economics. Creating software takes time of people. Time costs money, and much more of that when it comes to highly skilled engineers. The fact software has virtually no replication costs does not change the fact that its engineering is as expensive if not more so than engineering of other goods.
- cycloptic 7y agoThe open source project coming first and getting popular is the equivalent of finding product-market fit. I'm not singling this out, it's a potential alternate source of credit that can be combined with traditional investments although it doesn't have to be.
- morelisp 7y agoIt's easy to sell external hosting when the product is a security nightmare, difficult to configure, and extremely resource intensive in its default state.
- cycloptic 7y agoThat's exactly why I think more companies should be pursuing this strategy.