6 ms·

Don't assume "there is no money in X", but rather assume "there are no VCs that wish to invest". (Further, this is what ONE guy tells you, it's not unusual to

Don't assume "there is no money in X", but rather assume "there are no VCs that wish to invest". (Further, this is what ONE guy tells you, it's not unusual to have to talk to two dozen -- though I'm not sure you should). You might still be able to sell a PHP optimizer if you can figure out how to make parts of it proprietary and keep your company very small and tight. Picking up a VC will change the way they expect you to grow in ways you might not wish to grow, as they want very very large exits for large companies. You may still have a sustainable business or a side project that you can love and make money on. However, be sure if you do or you don't, if you are giving up gainful employment. Realize the VCs motives are about extremely rapid growth, however, and that's not really required. I believe there was an article on here recently about a Ruby task manager that had a proprietary plugin selling for $400 or so, and (I could be wrong) I believe that was enough to operate as a business for the guy running it. You probably have something you can charge more than for, if you can get away from the pure OSS route. Support may not work as a business model. It might, but it would be harder to sell. What you need first, though, is lots of users using your free edition, because otherwise you're going to have to spend a bit too much time in sales to people who might not really wish to change things over.

BruceM 12y ago
For much of the last 5 years, I've been one of a very small group of people maintaining, developing and improving Open Dylan (http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/) (a Lisp-like language without Lisp-like syntax). I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work. It has also given me a lot of experience working with pretty much anything I want in the compiler, debugger, linker, run-time libraries, performance tools, C bindings generators, networking code, garbage collection, type systems and so much more. Some of this has resulted in further contract work, some has resulted in contributed fixes or improvements to other libraries. (I'm now looking to potentially fund a student for some work this coming summer.) Now, I'm taking a lot of what I've learned from that and starting up a small business (not looking for VC) to produce a new kind of developer tool. We plan to be open source and have some customizations and packaged products that businesses will be interested in and suspect we can fund ourselves that way. It'll be a long hard slog to get there, but we're pretty excited about what we're doing. In general, I think there are a lot of things that could really use improvements. Our shells haven't changed much in the last 20 years. (I wrote a post about this last October: http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/. http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/.) Almost everywhere you look, there are things that could be better. Most of them are a hard sell as a business. Some sort of increased infrastructure funding would be great. Along those lines, there are programs that provide funding for some of those sorts of things. Stripe had an open source residency program for a short while. Mozilla funds some projects. The Knight Foundation funds a number of things a couple of times a year. Even Comcast has a funding program (http://techfund.comcast.com/ http://techfund.comcast.com/). I'd love it if organizations over a certain size allocated some funding for some work that might benefit them, but would also have a wider benefit. If someone has 50 or 100 programmers on staff, they can probably afford to sponsor someone for 3 months or a year at a time. And who knows what might come of some of it...
- phkahler 12y ago
  >> I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work. To be clear, you are donating your time to the project. There is no other source of funding. This is the same as a side project on top of your consulting gig.
  - e12e 12y ago
    I'm not so sure, from the full paragraph above, it seems that he gets to work on/exercise the compiler as part of the consulting?
    - BruceM 12y ago
      Indeed, I did.
      - phkahler 12y ago
        Well that awesome then! Carry on.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
- e12e 12y ago
  Glad to hear Open Dylan is still moving ahead! A question: do you think it would make sense/be reasonable to try to write a racket language extension for Dylan? Sort of as an alternate implementation? (Not really asking if it would make sense for the Open Dylan project to use resources for that, more if there are obvious things/differences between Dylan and Racket/scheme that would make it infeasible).
mountaineer 12y ago
I believe you're referring to Sidekiq[1] as the Ruby task manager? The author does have a business dedicated to it and another monitoring tool now[2]. [1] http://sidekiq.org/ http://sidekiq.org/ [2] http://contribsys.com/ http://contribsys.com/
- mpdehaan2 12y ago
  Yep, that was it. Haven't used it, but seemed the business model was a good choice!
simonebrunozzi 12y ago
Agreed. Take a look at what Sysdig (https://sysdigcloud.com https://sysdigcloud.com) is doing. Free version, paired with an enterprise version with more features and support. The founder previously created Wireshark and adopted the same strategy. It worked (they were acquired by Riverbed a few years ago).

BruceM 12y ago

For much of the last 5 years, I've been one of a very small group of people maintaining, developing and improving Open Dylan (http://opendylan.org/ http://opendylan.org/) (a Lisp-like language without Lisp-like syntax). I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work. It has also given me a lot of experience working with pretty much anything I want in the compiler, debugger, linker, run-time libraries, performance tools, C bindings generators, networking code, garbage collection, type systems and so much more. Some of this has resulted in further contract work, some has resulted in contributed fixes or improvements to other libraries. (I'm now looking to potentially fund a student for some work this coming summer.) Now, I'm taking a lot of what I've learned from that and starting up a small business (not looking for VC) to produce a new kind of developer tool. We plan to be open source and have some customizations and packaged products that businesses will be interested in and suspect we can fund ourselves that way. It'll be a long hard slog to get there, but we're pretty excited about what we're doing. In general, I think there are a lot of things that could really use improvements. Our shells haven't changed much in the last 20 years. (I wrote a post about this last October: http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/. http://waywardmonkeys.org/2014/10/10/rich-command-shells/.) Almost everywhere you look, there are things that could be better. Most of them are a hard sell as a business. Some sort of increased infrastructure funding would be great. Along those lines, there are programs that provide funding for some of those sorts of things. Stripe had an open source residency program for a short while. Mozilla funds some projects. The Knight Foundation funds a number of things a couple of times a year. Even Comcast has a funding program (http://techfund.comcast.com/ http://techfund.comcast.com/). I'd love it if organizations over a certain size allocated some funding for some work that might benefit them, but would also have a wider benefit. If someone has 50 or 100 programmers on staff, they can probably afford to sponsor someone for 3 months or a year at a time. And who knows what might come of some of it...

phkahler 12y ago
>> I've managed to fund some of the work by doing other contract work. To be clear, you are donating your time to the project. There is no other source of funding. This is the same as a side project on top of your consulting gig.
- e12e 12y ago
  I'm not so sure, from the full paragraph above, it seems that he gets to work on/exercise the compiler as part of the consulting?
  - BruceM 12y ago
    Indeed, I did.
    - phkahler 12y ago
      Well that awesome then! Carry on.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
e12e 12y ago
Glad to hear Open Dylan is still moving ahead! A question: do you think it would make sense/be reasonable to try to write a racket language extension for Dylan? Sort of as an alternate implementation? (Not really asking if it would make sense for the Open Dylan project to use resources for that, more if there are obvious things/differences between Dylan and Racket/scheme that would make it infeasible).

mountaineer 12y ago

I believe you're referring to Sidekiq[1] as the Ruby task manager? The author does have a business dedicated to it and another monitoring tool now[2]. [1] http://sidekiq.org/ http://sidekiq.org/ [2] http://contribsys.com/ http://contribsys.com/

mpdehaan2 12y ago
Yep, that was it. Haven't used it, but seemed the business model was a good choice!

simonebrunozzi 12y ago

Agreed. Take a look at what Sysdig (https://sysdigcloud.com https://sysdigcloud.com) is doing. Free version, paired with an enterprise version with more features and support. The founder previously created Wireshark and adopted the same strategy. It worked (they were acquired by Riverbed a few years ago).