I think your audience will likely be thinking: I believe you that your framework is better than Hibernate, but is it so much better that it will be worth my tim

I think your audience will likely be thinking: I believe you that your framework is better than Hibernate, but is it so much better that it will be worth my time to download it? to set it up? to learn how to use it? to train the entire team to use it? to get their questions answered when they have a problem? The above is a high bar to hit - even if it is free. And if you charge, you have a bigger challenge. If you are building a framework for the Java community, I think that your answer is to make a large part (that is significantly better than Hibernate) open source. Once you do that, and see the community forming around it, then you should think about monetizing it. Likely by selling support, services, premium connectors, monitoring tools. While I would be willing to believe that you guys have an amazing product, I am still extremely skeptical in believing that you will be able to build a business around it. So think MVP without investing too much into it. And right now, MVP sounds like: make it open source. You might want to see how the Vaadin guys make money.