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I do appreciate what Copycopter has done by identifying the right business that can make it available as an open source product. There is lot of news about SAA
by skrish 15y ago
I do appreciate what Copycopter has done by identifying the right business that can make it available as an open source product.
There is lot of news about SAAS businesses going under recently and this is definitely not a good trend.
One reason is they are under pressure to provide some kind of return to VCs even if it is by selling off the businesses. The merits of taking money or not is a different discussion altogether.
Why wouldn't these 'startups' try to tighten up the belt, build a profitable business by figuring out premium services and actually RUN these services profitably?
- sirclueless 15y agoIf the value isn't there, then tightening the belt is just a cop-out. Even if the service could stagnate with a steady trickle of profit, it's not worth it to the founders who have their eyes on a bigger prize. The consumers who do derive considerable value are better served by an open-source implementation that can be iterated upon and developed further anyways.
- patricksroberts 15y agoThoughtbot isn't actually a VC backed startup. They have always developed products by building tools to fit needs in their consultancy work and unfortunately not all the products were successful enough to keep going. The reality for Copycopter is that it's a really useful item in the Rails developers toolkit. It didn't find a wide enough audience within the community which is what eventually doomed it as a SaaS. The cost of spending even 5-10 hours a week working on it burns more capital than I imagine it generated as a SaaS. That's why I think it's a perfect fit of an OSS project.