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It's a matter of sound business decisions more than anything. This is a classic example of not understanding your target audience. Look at the competition: on o

It's a matter of sound business decisions more than anything. This is a classic example of not understanding your target audience. Look at the competition: on one end, you have a flexible, open source web testing framework like CasperJS (targeted at developers); on the other hand, you have end-user oriented products like Fake.app that are paid and closed source. One could even argue that Selenium itself (also free) has a nice enough GUI to be considered power user friendly. When you start charging devs for closed source, paid applications, you're getting into the territories of Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. Is that really how this independent team wants to position itself? Can this team even support the kinds of problems that enterprise clients have every day? Seems like a really terrible segment to target. And if this team was really thinking that indie devs would go and blindly purchase a product like this from an unheard-of company with no established reputation, then, again, they need to go back to the drawing board with their business model and/or hire someone who can provide guidance.

mherrmann 13y ago
I thank you for your honest and direct feedback. Obviously, it's very interesting for us to hear, and if you are right and we do not understand our target audience or our business model is flawed, then we have a problem that we should find out sooner rather than later. You have a lot of criticism for how we position ourselves, and our product. I deeply believe that there is a market for a tool such as Helium, be it open- or closed source. Assuming that we have a product that the market wants, can you recommend a way for us to make this product open source, yet generate an income that allows us to sustain its development?
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  An idea (maybe too obvious) that comes to mind would be to host people's tests and send alerts when tests fail, then work up a deal with Heroku to offer your web testing service as a plugin. Many of the plugin services have the same type of tiered business model. You could do something like a 30 day trial (or, alternatively, 1 test per day free), then offer services for 50 requests, 500, 1000, etc. I'm not incredibly familiar with how frequently web tests run and how many pages/forms/fields the average project has, so obviously you'd have to tweak those numbers based on what you think will generate the most revenue.

mherrmann 13y ago

I thank you for your honest and direct feedback. Obviously, it's very interesting for us to hear, and if you are right and we do not understand our target audience or our business model is flawed, then we have a problem that we should find out sooner rather than later. You have a lot of criticism for how we position ourselves, and our product. I deeply believe that there is a market for a tool such as Helium, be it open- or closed source. Assuming that we have a product that the market wants, can you recommend a way for us to make this product open source, yet generate an income that allows us to sustain its development?

rmrfrmrf 13y ago
An idea (maybe too obvious) that comes to mind would be to host people's tests and send alerts when tests fail, then work up a deal with Heroku to offer your web testing service as a plugin. Many of the plugin services have the same type of tiered business model. You could do something like a 30 day trial (or, alternatively, 1 test per day free), then offer services for 50 requests, 500, 1000, etc. I'm not incredibly familiar with how frequently web tests run and how many pages/forms/fields the average project has, so obviously you'd have to tweak those numbers based on what you think will generate the most revenue.