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Yes, absolutely. I'm starting a business, and this is my real product. Most everybody will see my FOSS code as my product, but that's my loss leader. My real
by gavinhoward 3y ago
Yes, absolutely.
I'm starting a business, and this is my real product.
Most everybody will see my FOSS code as my product, but that's my loss leader.
My real product, the stuff people will actually pay for, is doing stuff such as responding to bug reports like [1].
In other words, my product is caring about your needs and meeting them.
On the flip side, I want customers who care too. I think one reason those furniture people did so well is because they had a customer who cared, and it was refreshing.
When you do something day in and day out, you either become careless, or obsessed.
As a customer, you want to seek out the latter, but as a vendor, when you are the latter, getting a customer who cares is not just refreshing, it's enormously fun!
[1]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66 https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66
- actionfromafar 3y agoTo be clear, do you have paying bc customers? I guess not, but I wanted to absolutely sure! :-)
- gavinhoward 3y agoNo, absolutely not! bc is my gift to the world. It will remain that way. I'm writing other software, upon which my business will be based. You could say bc is how I advertise my services. :)
- kahnclusions 3y agoThen he wouldn’t be giving a shit, he’d be selling some shit.
- darkwater 3y agoYou are a wonderful person, Gavin!
- gavinhoward 3y agoThank you for the compliment and encouragement! I've been feeling down lately, and it's helped.
- mtlynch 3y ago>My real product, the stuff people will actually pay for, is doing stuff such as responding to bug reports like [1]. But that's not something anyone has paid you for, so it's actually a counterexample. Boasting about your clever business strategy when you have no paying customers is like boasting about your excellent fishing technique when you've never visited a body of water.
- gavinhoward 3y agoI mean, I could have qualified it with "the stuff I hope people pay me for," but eh. And you're kinda wrong; I've been paid for bc, kind of. I've been paid by people adopting it, an obscure alternative to an obscure command-line tool that nobody uses. And yet, my bc is in FreeBSD and Mac OSX. Perhaps the reason I'm confident is because this little thing of mine managed to replace entrenched competitors in a few places. Why can't I do it again?
- mtlynch 3y ago>Perhaps the reason I'm confident is because this little thing of mine managed to replace entrenched competitors in a few places. Why can't I do it again? It's much harder to get people to pay you for a product than it is to convince them to use your product for free. As a fellow founder, I wish you success, but I think you're assuming success based on things that don't really correlate with success from my experience running indie businesses for the last five years. I've fallen into the exact same trap myself, so maybe I can save you some time.[0, 1] Before you have money safely in your bank account from real, paying customers, all the indicators you see are highly noisy. Non-paying users can be a good sign, but they can also lead you astray. You could have 1,000 non-paying open-source users actively engaged with your product, and that does nothing for your business if none of them are willing to pay. You're better off finding 10 users willing to pay $40/month and letting their feedback guide your work. I recommend testing customer's willingness to pay ASAP. If nobody's willing to pay for what you're offering, it's a sign that your product hypothesis was wrong and you need to gather more feedback about what customers want and pivot. [0] https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/ https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/ [1] https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/ https://mtlynch.io/keep-growing-never-profit/