9 ms·

The unusual way I'm funding my open source work

johnjohn22 6y ago
nicee
- sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
  Thank you!
sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
Hey HN, Funding Open Source is a hot topic here and after more than one year of full-time work without being paid I have finally achieved (a little bit more than) ramen profitability. I'm happy to answer any question.
- andrewnicolalde 6y ago
  Might have just missed it on the website, but will early access buyers get access to the finished version on completion?
  - sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
    For sure! I will send the chapters to all early access buyers as soon as they are available. Please remember that chapters could be updated even after their initial publication according to the feedback I will receive.
1996 6y ago
TLDR: you are selling a book
- axiosgunnar 6y ago
  He is, and it's cleverly wrapped content marketing, but I would let it pass since his "content" is actually a complete software package. If every content marketeer, instead of spamming low effort Medium posts, would be publishing fully-fledged software repos, I think that would be quite a positive development :)
  - sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
    Hey, I have to admit that I moderately appreciate being compared to the content marketing crowd but still appreciate the kind words :) Yes, my ability to pay the rent is directly related to the number of books I sell. That being said, I thought it was worth sharing because a lot of people think they can't make a living writing Open Source code. I hope to change their mind and give them ideas to take the leap. Edit: rephrasing
    - yiyus 6y ago
      > my ability to pay the rent is directly related to the number of books I sell Do you have (and are willing to share) an estimation of how many books you expect to sell per month?
      - sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
        It's extremely hard to tell. As iainctduncan said I will need to do some A/B testing. I believe that more than 100 books a month will be enough to make a comfortable living.
        Xevi 6y ago
        I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but that feels like a rather large number to sustain over a long period for a book like this. It convers a niche field in a language with a relatively small userbase. I would love to be proven wrong though, and I really hope that you do sell a lot of books. I might even buy it if I decide to pick up Rust again. Best of luck!
        6y ago
- sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
  Yes! As this is a rarely discussed topic, I thought it was worth sharing :)
axiosgunnar 6y ago
Hi, this is interesting and I wish you all the best. Just as a random anecdata point, the price that I was expecting and would personally be willing to pay would be 20€. This is because I am not planning on working in IT security and would be reading this foro fun. Just FYI, since I think it's interesting for you to know the price sensitivity of people. Don't know if you would be able to finance yourself at that price point, but again I just want to give feedback. Perhaps this could be achieved via a steeper early adopter discount. Perhaps I'm simply not the target group. Hope this is helpful somehow.
- sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
  I really appreciate this kind of feedback, because a lot of people will think that but won't bother leaving a comment and I will never be aware. Thank you! Today it makes no sense to reduce the price of the book because of the niche topic covered and my small audience, but for sure I will re-evaluate it later.
  - axiosgunnar 6y ago
    Yep, that's what I thought! Good luck! :-)
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I agree with the parent. Much above $20 for a technical book is getting into "this is an expensive book" for me. Doesn't mean I won't ever buy it, but it's probably not the sort of thing I'll go "Why not?" right away and click the button.
  - iainctduncan 6y ago
    You don't actually know this unless you have run an A/B test. Pricing a book is like software, you might very well sell many more than twice as many copies at half the cost, off hobbyist sales. (background, I worked in the book business years ago). If you really want to know if you're doing it right, run a time limited test of different prices and see what happens. I doubt this is nearly as much a niche as you think.
hpoe 6y ago
I like the idea, although I don't know this is really unusual. It is the basic RedHat shtick you are making money off the knowledge in your head. The difference is that instead of giving it out in a consulting contract it is in a book.
- ddek 6y ago
  Except I’m not sure they’re related enough. If OP’s book was a productivity guide based off bloom, for sure. Instead it’s a collection of learnings discovered while (although likely not exclusively while) developing the product.
blackbear_ 6y ago
Immediately thought of "how to lose money" [1] (posted a few days ago): > 2. Write a Book > Most consistent > You might think writing a book is a great way to make a bunch of cash – and you’d be wrong. In spite of the many books that will tell you how to make money writing a book, I’m here to let you in on a secret –writing a book is actually a fantastic way to lose money. I’ve written four short books and they have literally grossed hundreds of dollars. Now – hearing that I’ve sold some books might make you think you should write one also. But it’s a trap – you will spend hundreds of hours writing a book and then make hundreds of dollars in return. Not sure about you, but if I’m working for $1/hour I’m losing money fast. My latest book probably has more pages than it has copies sold – take a look here if you want a quick reference on how to get a job. Jokes aside, props for the creativity and best of luck! [1] https://www.getrevue.co/profile/andrewtye/issues/how-to-lose-money-323332 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/andrewtye/issues/how-to-lose...
- acegopher 6y ago
  You forgot the link... would like to read.
  - blackbear_ 6y ago
    Oops, added!
- Swizec 6y ago
  Writing a popular book is also the easiest way to make money. While it's infoproducts not just books, I've made around $250,000 over the past 5 or 6 years with my sidehustle. If you add the dayjob/consulting opportunities it enabled, that number easily jumps to $500,000. Yes, being born in SFBA, going to Stanford, and getting on the startup wagon straight out of school would've been a better ROI, but that path was not available to me. The sidehustle did however open it up and I'm on that ride now with about a 6 to 7 year delay. tldr: Write something people want to read.
  - rewgs 6y ago
    Would love a link to one/some/all of your books!
Sophistifunk 6y ago
This sounds like "having a job on the side" only far less profitable. Being an author is like being a musician, there's a handful of superstars, a few people who make a living (by working their tits off), and hordes and hordes of people who might occasionally make some money, but still need a real job. Hell, in Australia, even the (comparatively) superstar musicians have day jobs.
merb 6y ago
tl;dr use a license that is not stupid for your business case. (in his case agpl)
rychco 6y ago
I have yet to dive into Rust beyond "hello, world", but I am looking forward to the book.
jnwatson 6y ago
I negotiated with my employer to spend some time every week on an open source project they depend on. It isn't by any means a full time job, and I could definitely spend more time on it, but it does allow me to contribute to open source without completely ruining my life. It helps that the main job is also open-source-based, so they're already committed to the concept.
xupybd 6y ago
Why not look for a brick and mortar University to teach at? You could probably fund the project with research funding and pump out the required papers just working on it.
john_moscow 6y ago
>I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. This is extremely extremely extremely naive. In reality, it's very easy to get praise and encouragement from a random stranger on the Internet, but it's extremely hard to get a single dollar of actual commitment from them. The original Reddit thread has 85 comments. Optimistically assuming that every single one of them donated the asking 10€, it's 850€ for multiple months of work. In reality, the donation ratio would be the same order of magnitude as the conversion rate for ad clicks to downloads, that is about 1-5%. So, it's 8.5-42.5€ for multiple months of work. Sorry to be brutal, but making money off something is a craft that is not easier than software development itself. That involves market analysis, lead acquisition, feature prioritization, price research, and a magnitude of other factors. Having a bunch of positive Reddit feedback is a marketing equivalent of downloading a "Hello, World in Java Script" tutorial and managing to run it in the browser. It's very far from the final product.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  "I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. " OP seems happy enough. I quoted the same as you and yet read it differently. They have literally said: "Funding secured. <party>". Sorry to be brutal but Sylvain seems quite happy about their approach to making money. [Edit: Soz, my quote is not quite the same as yours and things may have changed between your and my quote. I await DV oblivion 8) ]
  - john_moscow 6y ago
    I am merely a random stranger on the Internet with a random opinion. It's up to OP to consider it or ignore it. Speaking for myself, I ran a few donation-funded projects for a few years and found out that it involves too much mental gymnastics. Hey, I'm almost making the minimum wage. I don't have a family, I live with my parents, but at least I'm free and don't have a shitty boss. It's great, and I'm happy, right? Right? Tell me people, it's great, it's truly great? So I learned the business skills, started working on a for-profit business idea, tweaked it based on the early feedback, and grew it into a full-time business that pays comparably to a corporate job. It was much harder than keeping to tell myself that my parents' basement is all I need, but it paid off well in the long term.
pabs3 6y ago
Some other resources for funding open source work: https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
the_only_law 6y ago
> Having a real job™ beside: but is your project worth sacrificing all your free time for it? I often ask myself the same about that real job™.
speedtest 6y ago
https://testmyinternetspeed.org/ https://testmyinternetspeed.org/

nicee

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
Thank you!

Hey HN, Funding Open Source is a hot topic here and after more than one year of full-time work without being paid I have finally achieved (a little bit more than) ramen profitability. I'm happy to answer any question.

andrewnicolalde 6y ago
Might have just missed it on the website, but will early access buyers get access to the finished version on completion?
- sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
  For sure! I will send the chapters to all early access buyers as soon as they are available. Please remember that chapters could be updated even after their initial publication according to the feedback I will receive.

1996 6y ago

TLDR: you are selling a book

axiosgunnar 6y ago
He is, and it's cleverly wrapped content marketing, but I would let it pass since his "content" is actually a complete software package. If every content marketeer, instead of spamming low effort Medium posts, would be publishing fully-fledged software repos, I think that would be quite a positive development :)
- sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
  Hey, I have to admit that I moderately appreciate being compared to the content marketing crowd but still appreciate the kind words :) Yes, my ability to pay the rent is directly related to the number of books I sell. That being said, I thought it was worth sharing because a lot of people think they can't make a living writing Open Source code. I hope to change their mind and give them ideas to take the leap. Edit: rephrasing
  - yiyus 6y ago
    > my ability to pay the rent is directly related to the number of books I sell Do you have (and are willing to share) an estimation of how many books you expect to sell per month?
    - sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
      It's extremely hard to tell. As iainctduncan said I will need to do some A/B testing. I believe that more than 100 books a month will be enough to make a comfortable living.
      - Xevi 6y ago
        I don't want to sound like a pessimist, but that feels like a rather large number to sustain over a long period for a book like this. It convers a niche field in a language with a relatively small userbase. I would love to be proven wrong though, and I really hope that you do sell a lot of books. I might even buy it if I decide to pick up Rust again. Best of luck!
      - 6y ago
sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
Yes! As this is a rarely discussed topic, I thought it was worth sharing :)

axiosgunnar 6y ago

Hi, this is interesting and I wish you all the best. Just as a random anecdata point, the price that I was expecting and would personally be willing to pay would be 20€. This is because I am not planning on working in IT security and would be reading this foro fun. Just FYI, since I think it's interesting for you to know the price sensitivity of people. Don't know if you would be able to finance yourself at that price point, but again I just want to give feedback. Perhaps this could be achieved via a steeper early adopter discount. Perhaps I'm simply not the target group. Hope this is helpful somehow.

sylvain_kerkour 6y ago
I really appreciate this kind of feedback, because a lot of people will think that but won't bother leaving a comment and I will never be aware. Thank you! Today it makes no sense to reduce the price of the book because of the niche topic covered and my small audience, but for sure I will re-evaluate it later.
- axiosgunnar 6y ago
  Yep, that's what I thought! Good luck! :-)
- ghaff 6y ago
  I agree with the parent. Much above $20 for a technical book is getting into "this is an expensive book" for me. Doesn't mean I won't ever buy it, but it's probably not the sort of thing I'll go "Why not?" right away and click the button.
- iainctduncan 6y ago
  You don't actually know this unless you have run an A/B test. Pricing a book is like software, you might very well sell many more than twice as many copies at half the cost, off hobbyist sales. (background, I worked in the book business years ago). If you really want to know if you're doing it right, run a time limited test of different prices and see what happens. I doubt this is nearly as much a niche as you think.

hpoe 6y ago

I like the idea, although I don't know this is really unusual. It is the basic RedHat shtick you are making money off the knowledge in your head. The difference is that instead of giving it out in a consulting contract it is in a book.

ddek 6y ago
Except I’m not sure they’re related enough. If OP’s book was a productivity guide based off bloom, for sure. Instead it’s a collection of learnings discovered while (although likely not exclusively while) developing the product.

blackbear_ 6y ago

Immediately thought of "how to lose money" [1] (posted a few days ago): > 2. Write a Book > Most consistent > You might think writing a book is a great way to make a bunch of cash – and you’d be wrong. In spite of the many books that will tell you how to make money writing a book, I’m here to let you in on a secret –writing a book is actually a fantastic way to lose money. I’ve written four short books and they have literally grossed hundreds of dollars. Now – hearing that I’ve sold some books might make you think you should write one also. But it’s a trap – you will spend hundreds of hours writing a book and then make hundreds of dollars in return. Not sure about you, but if I’m working for $1/hour I’m losing money fast. My latest book probably has more pages than it has copies sold – take a look here if you want a quick reference on how to get a job. Jokes aside, props for the creativity and best of luck! [1] https://www.getrevue.co/profile/andrewtye/issues/how-to-lose-money-323332 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/andrewtye/issues/how-to-lose...

acegopher 6y ago
You forgot the link... would like to read.
- blackbear_ 6y ago
  Oops, added!
Swizec 6y ago
Writing a popular book is also the easiest way to make money. While it's infoproducts not just books, I've made around $250,000 over the past 5 or 6 years with my sidehustle. If you add the dayjob/consulting opportunities it enabled, that number easily jumps to $500,000. Yes, being born in SFBA, going to Stanford, and getting on the startup wagon straight out of school would've been a better ROI, but that path was not available to me. The sidehustle did however open it up and I'm on that ride now with about a 6 to 7 year delay. tldr: Write something people want to read.
- rewgs 6y ago
  Would love a link to one/some/all of your books!

Sophistifunk 6y ago

This sounds like "having a job on the side" only far less profitable. Being an author is like being a musician, there's a handful of superstars, a few people who make a living (by working their tits off), and hordes and hordes of people who might occasionally make some money, but still need a real job. Hell, in Australia, even the (comparatively) superstar musicians have day jobs.

merb 6y ago

tl;dr use a license that is not stupid for your business case. (in his case agpl)

rychco 6y ago

I have yet to dive into Rust beyond "hello, world", but I am looking forward to the book.

jnwatson 6y ago

I negotiated with my employer to spend some time every week on an open source project they depend on. It isn't by any means a full time job, and I could definitely spend more time on it, but it does allow me to contribute to open source without completely ruining my life. It helps that the main job is also open-source-based, so they're already committed to the concept.

xupybd 6y ago

Why not look for a brick and mortar University to teach at? You could probably fund the project with research funding and pump out the required papers just working on it.

john_moscow 6y ago

>I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. This is extremely extremely extremely naive. In reality, it's very easy to get praise and encouragement from a random stranger on the Internet, but it's extremely hard to get a single dollar of actual commitment from them. The original Reddit thread has 85 comments. Optimistically assuming that every single one of them donated the asking 10€, it's 850€ for multiple months of work. In reality, the donation ratio would be the same order of magnitude as the conversion rate for ad clicks to downloads, that is about 1-5%. So, it's 8.5-42.5€ for multiple months of work. Sorry to be brutal, but making money off something is a craft that is not easier than software development itself. That involves market analysis, lead acquisition, feature prioritization, price research, and a magnitude of other factors. Having a bunch of positive Reddit feedback is a marketing equivalent of downloading a "Hello, World in Java Script" tutorial and managing to run it in the browser. It's very far from the final product.

gerdesj 6y ago
"I announced the (extremely) early-access edition of the book on Reddit last week and received a lot of positive feedback. Idea validated. Funding secured. " OP seems happy enough. I quoted the same as you and yet read it differently. They have literally said: "Funding secured. <party>". Sorry to be brutal but Sylvain seems quite happy about their approach to making money. [Edit: Soz, my quote is not quite the same as yours and things may have changed between your and my quote. I await DV oblivion 8) ]
- john_moscow 6y ago
  I am merely a random stranger on the Internet with a random opinion. It's up to OP to consider it or ignore it. Speaking for myself, I ran a few donation-funded projects for a few years and found out that it involves too much mental gymnastics. Hey, I'm almost making the minimum wage. I don't have a family, I live with my parents, but at least I'm free and don't have a shitty boss. It's great, and I'm happy, right? Right? Tell me people, it's great, it's truly great? So I learned the business skills, started working on a for-profit business idea, tweaked it based on the early feedback, and grew it into a full-time business that pays comparably to a corporate job. It was much harder than keeping to tell myself that my parents' basement is all I need, but it paid off well in the long term.

pabs3 6y ago

Some other resources for funding open source work: https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

the_only_law 6y ago

> Having a real job™ beside: but is your project worth sacrificing all your free time for it? I often ask myself the same about that real job™.

speedtest 6y ago

https://testmyinternetspeed.org/ https://testmyinternetspeed.org/