
Ask HN: How big does an open-source project need to be for a lifestyle business? - jnbiche
Specifically, about how many &quot;stars&quot; on Github would such an open source project need to start realistically thinking about turning it into a lifestyle business, since GH stars are probably the most prominent quantitative indicator I know of in this area.<p>I&#x27;ve got an open source project that has grown fast with relatively little promotion.  I know that a good number of companies are using it in production.  I also know of a good way to monetize it, while keeping the existing software exactly like it is (not &quot;open core&quot; but somewhat related).<p>Is this a pipe dream, or do I have a realistic chance into making this a lifestyle business that -- with hard work -- can start providing a reasonable income (say $100,000&#x2F;yr) within a year or two?
======
ledlauzis
You can turn everything into a business as long as you have a reasonable
business plan in place and know that users are willing to pay for some extra
features or service.

Story time: 2 years ago I started to learn frontend web development from
various online courses. I had zero technical background and no intention to
make money. Within few months I learned enough to create my first WordPress
theme. It was terrible but it worked . I made few more themes and never did
anything with them. I made like 6 themes and just deleted theme few months
down the road. Then I decided to submit one theme on WordPress.org just to see
if it gets approved. Themes goes through review and someone would evaluate my
code and that's what I was after. Long story short my themes now have been
downloaded over 1,000,000 times and I have turned it into 6 figure a year
business.

While I haven't sold a single theme yet, apparently you can recommend hosting
and premium plugins that goes along with your themes and make a decent income.

For those interested you can visit site at:
[https://colorlib.com/](https://colorlib.com/)

~~~
tylercubell
> I have turned it into 6 figure a year business.

> While I haven't sold a single theme yet

What?

~~~
ledlauzis
Yes, that's correct :) Most income comes from advertising, paid reviews,
sponsorship, affiliate products (hosting, plugins, premium themes from other
developers).

------
gavinballard
Mike Perham has done a great job of turning two successful open source
projects (Sidekiq and Inspeqtor) into successful businesses.

If you're interested, I recommend listening to his interviews on the ChangeLog
Podcast ([https://changelog.com/159/](https://changelog.com/159/),
[https://changelog.com/130/](https://changelog.com/130/),
[https://changelog.com/92/](https://changelog.com/92/)) where he talks about
how he monetised those products.

I'm pretty sure that succeeding in this is not going to be a matter of how
many "stars" your project has, but rather a function of the dollar value of
the problem your software solves and how well you market the paid product. You
should start that marketing now by providing a link to your project :).

~~~
jnbiche
Thanks for the excellent resources, I'll look that up.

> You should start that marketing now by providing a link to your project :).

Well, I haven't even created the paid product at this point, it's still early
in the game. Just trying to get a feel for the potentials.

~~~
gavinballard
> Thanks for the excellent resources, I'll look that up.

You're welcome!

> Well, I haven't even created the paid product at this point, it's still
> early in the game. Just trying to get a feel for the potentials.

Sure, but you're at the top of Hacker News right now and there's zero downside
(and lots of upside) in getting your project in front of a bunch of
developers. Even if they don't start using it right away, maybe it will stick
in their minds and then six months down the track (when you do have a paid
version) they'll Google it.

------
josscrowcroft
I created Open Exchange Rates[0] as an open source project four years ago,
publishing free currency data into a GitHub repository.

It was launched alongside money.js[1] (a minimal JavaScript currency
conversion library), designed to work seamlessly together and both found a
brilliant response and grew an organic community.

Hundreds of tutorials and thousands of posts and mentions later, GitHub
eventually contacted me and politely asked me to take down the exchange rates
repository, because they were being hammered by people requesting the data -
only at this point did it occur to me that I'd created something of genuine
value, and (6 months of fretting and tail-chasing later) I opened up a paid
option.

For me the key thing was: I never intended to create a business. It was (and
is) a labour of love. We've since grown to be the industry-leader for our area
- "good enough data" for the startup and SME market - and count Etsy,
KickStarter, WordPress and Lonely Planet among our clients.

Although it's no longer truly open source, 98% of our users are still on the
Free plan, which will very soon be expanding to include all features (so, no
more limiting by price tiers) - this is how I still feel so passionate about
it.

I can't wait to publish the next steps in our journey - where we're opening
everything up to the community and marketplace. I don't like where the
industry is heading (competitive, closed, secretive) and we've chosen to move
towards transparency and sharing.

I like businesses built on a core of open source community, because they're in
service to the people who are actually building the products, rather than
those in the traditional 'upper levels'. This means there's really no "sales
process" (which I'm massively allergic to) - apart from the occasional
grilling from the accounting department, who may find it hard to trust a
business based on open source principles.

Good luck!

[0] [https://openexchangerates.org](https://openexchangerates.org)

[1]
[https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js](https://github.com/openexchangerates/money.js)

~~~
jakobegger
I'd like to thank you for creating your API, and for the generous terms on the
free plan. I'm using your API to estimate my weekly revenue (internal
reporting).

A suggestion: It would be awesome if it was possible to download historic data
in batch format (eg. CSV) which would make it easy to copy the data into my
reporting database. When I started working on my own reporting solution, I'd
have paid $100 just to download a CSV file with 5 years of exchange rates,
even though the data is available for free on a bunch of websites, since it's
such a hassle to collect.

~~~
justincormack
The Bank of Canada have downloads (CSV, RSS) for historical rates
[http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/exchange/](http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/exchange/)
\- you may need to convert to eg USD rates but the data is easily accessible.

------
fragmede
Yeah, so looking at the GitHub Cabal's secret price list, 25,000 GH stars will
put you at $102k / yr, so shoot for that.

Seriously though, the fact that you're asking about GitHub stars is...
telling. There's plenty of popular repo's on GitHub that I'd refuse to pay any
money to, but more to the point, GitHub is a terrible _customer_ experience
because it's not for selling software to people, thus the only thing 'GH
stars' tells us is... the number of people that have starred a particular
repo.

For a purely open-source project, look at OpenSSL. It's probably in production
in a significant amount of the entire internet. But until Heartbleed came
along and it came to light that the OpenSSL project was _severely_
underfunded, it was limping along with little sponsorship.

Red Hat is probably the most famous open source business, but unfortunately,
if you look at their practices, they're abiding by the letter of the GPL, but
not entirely the spirit, which they've decided is necessary from a business
perspective, so if you're looking to make a lifestyle business based on your
open-source project, the question to you is: how comfortable would you be with
a lifestyle business based on an entirely proprietary project?

Is this a pipe dream? Chances are, yeah. But do dreams come true? Sometimes :)

~~~
jnbiche
I now regret choosing to bring up GH stars (was just grasping for some
concrete indicator).

I was more trying to start a conversation, which succeeded.

------
gizmo
It's completely feasible, but you're playing on hard mode when you keep the
software open source. If you've got good business sense and are willing to
hustle you'll find a way to succeed. If your only strong suit is software,
however, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Would you rather make $300k a year writing and selling proprietary software or
fail/make $20k a year providing value-added services for an open-source
project? This isn't a tough choice for me, but for some people the ideal of
open source trumps all.

It's much easier to write software that fits a simple business model, than to
figure out how to shoehorn a business model onto an open source project. You
can tell which route is the pragmatic one: start from scratch, optimize for
easy monetization.

That said, don't let any of this discourage you. It's absolutely possible to
create a cool lifestyle business based on an open source project (or anything
really). The only way to know if you can do this is to seriously commit to it.
If you don't have to support a family it's probably a risk you can take.

~~~
jnbiche
Thank you for your input, it's sobering, yet encouraging :).

> It's much easier to write software that fits a simple business model

Everyone talks about this, but how do I find this business model? Is there
some methodical way to uncover needed software?

I mean, everyone talks about having industry expertise, but I actually do have
industry expertise in a non-software-related industry (I only returned to
software development after a 10+ year hiatus). But my industry expertise is
worthless for this particular task, since this industry is absolutely
_flooded_ with software, mostly low quality but also some high quality stuff.
The last thing people in the industry need is another software package (and
they even say this).

So how do I find these vaunted "business models" for paid software?

~~~
gizmo
A business model isn't a unicorn. Your business model doesn't need to be
unique or even different. To the contrary: just do what's known to work!

90% of software companies have the following business model:

    
    
        * create proprietary software
        * charge money for licences
        * charge extra for support
        * charge extra for updates
        * pay through the nose for enterprise options
    

90% of saas companies work like this:

    
    
        * create proprietary software
        * offer a free trial
        * charge money for it every month
        * (optional) pay through the nose for enterprise options
    

It's just that simple. No need to overthink it.

Having industry expertise just makes it easier to get to product-market fit.
It's by no means a requirement. You may be undervaluing your industry
experience. Unless your market knowledge is really generic (e.g. webshops),
you've probably got some valuable insights.

(edit: most programmers get paid well, therefore, if you become a programmer
you're likely to get paid well. If there are a lot of companies making money
in a market, then you're likely to make a lot of money if you enter that
market. Inversely, if everybody in a market is struggling [indie games] then
you're likely to struggle too.)

~~~
abetusk
In the case of the SaaS business models, is the first step even needed? I'm
still trying to not be blinded by my idealism but is there really any value in
making source proprietary if it's a SaaS business? Would GitHub's popularity
be affected appreciably if it were closed? Google's?

I remain hopeful that the standard SaaS business model dovetails nicely with
free and open source software.

~~~
morgante
Google's certainly would be. Microsoft has dumped millions into trying to get
Bing to a point where it can even begin to compete with Google—if Google open
sourced their code, tons of competitors would crop up trying to take market
share.

GitHub would probably have less of a problem with open sourcing their code
because their primary value prop isn't that they've built some brilliant
software but that they take the bother out of managing your source hosting.

~~~
r3bl
> GitHub would probably have less of a problem with open sourcing their code
> because their primary value prop isn't that they've built some brilliant
> software but that they take the bother out of managing your source hosting.

GitHub is making money by selling their proprietary pack to other corporations
so they could implement it on their own server. If they release it for free,
they wouldn't be able to support free code hosting services and remain
profitable.

They're also selling premium plans for the regular users, but I don't think
that this gives them enough profit to remain profitable.

------
andrea_s
Making money with software is not very correlated with said software's quality
- or popularity. I think yours is an unanswerable question, you should
probably start from the other side of the equation (i.e. what's the target
marget? who would be willing to pay for the software? and, given that we are
talking about open source, what would you sell - and to whom - to beat the
possibility to just use it? What would the licensing options for commercial
usage look like?).

------
joepie91_
Here comes the unpopular opinion: I don't like open-source projects being
"turned into a business" at all. Something's always gotta give.

* Paid support: you now have an incentive _against_ improving the documentation. Conflict of interest.

* Selling binary builds: your software can no longer be easily recommended and shared by others.

* "Premium features": I'd rather call this 'crippleware'. You're intentionally crippling the 'community version' to give people an incentive to pay you money. That's certainly not in the spirit of open-source.

Frankly, I don't feel software is a thing that should be sold _at all_. You're
always going to be intentionally (and artificially) restricting _something_ to
make that business model work - after all, software is infinitely reproducible
at effectively zero cost.

Instead, if you absolutely _must_ make a business out of it, offer something
like a hosted service (that people can easily replicate themselves, in the
spirit of open-source). That way you _add_ something to be sold, rather than
taking something from the existing project and asking money for it.

The better option is to accept donations, and put some serious effort into
getting those going. I don't really understand why people will spend _weeks_
drawing up a business plan, but for donations they just slap a 'donate' link
in the footer of the page without thinking, and then complain after a few
months that they're barely getting any donations. Accepting donations requires
the same amount of thought to make it work.

EDIT: No bulletpoint lists on HN? :|

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Unpopular but not unreasonable.

\- software is a new form of literacy. Perhaps at some point in the past
literate people could contribute to the communi

\- the fallacy of altruism. Developers working on an open source JS drop list
widget are not being altruistic - their contribution to the community could as
easily be say working at a soup kitchen, probably with more value to the
world.

"Contributing to the community" is something we rely on Adam Smiths Invisible
Hand to help us with 99% of the time. So while I use and appreciate the OSS
developed to date, it has gone beyond a simple charitable model and into an
Eco-system beyond any simplistic approaches. I would like nirvana, but it's
dubious as a long term strategy for OSS.

\- conflicts of interest always happen. When it is important enough, say
Linus' salary, the community will either whither or find a way to build its
own institutions to make the important conflicts managed - like Linus salary.
This is part of building strong institutions we hear about so often

\- getting better at begging vs better at selling seems to be the last point
you make. Honestly I cannot see that as a honourable position of trade.

We don't have perfect solutions - but we are working on them

~~~
joepie91_
> getting better at begging vs better at selling seems to be the last point
> you make. Honestly I cannot see that as a honourable position of trade.

Asking for donations is most certainly _not_ begging, and I personally find
that a somewhat offensive way to present it.

Donations are a voluntary contribution in return for some kind of work that
was done; begging, by definition, isn't in return for _anything_. They are two
fundamentally different concepts, just as different as 'accepting donations'
versus 'selling'.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Ok - sponsorship.

Donations is to my mind a charitable endeavour - the small amount of change is
thrown over and not considered. In fact lack of consideration is probably the
right legal term. Sponsorship involves some contractural form to occur - and
so implies a trade of value.

To be fair you could have been saying get better at donations by rebranding
them as sponsorship instead of better at soliciting uncontracted
contributions.

But I still think we need to find a new and better way to monetise OSS
contributions.

------
karterk
You would never know unless you started exploring. Stars have nothing to do
with revenue - it's purely a function of how much value you can add to the
enterprise. Basically, you have to demonstrate quantitatively that you can
charge $X to help them save $Y where Y >> X.

Here's what I would suggest. Reach out to a few people from these
organizations and ask them for their general views on your project and what
their major pain points are. I'm sure they will be more than happy to talk to
you about it if they're indeed already deriving great value from it. Once you
have established a good rapport (i.e. warming up the lead), set-up a call with
them to pitch your vision for the paid product. A call is crucial because
email and text can only communicate so much - you can get a far better idea of
their domain and problems through a quick 45 min call. Scheduling this should
not be a major problem once you have established a good email channel
previously.

If you can get about 8-10 people interested in exploring your paid offering
you have something that's promising. After that you can think about scaling
the business with self-service etc.

~~~
jnbiche
I hate phone calls, but I suspect you're right about this. But calling
potential customers is definitely concrete advice I can do.

BTW, everyone discounts Github stars, but the one thing stars gives me is a
very easy-to-access list of potential customers.

~~~
tomcam
Great attitude! Making these phone calls is like building up a muscle. It will
become easier, I promise. And I think you'll be surprised at how pleasant many
of them will be. My best to you.

------
chrismartin
Sell your expertise as an integration/support engineer to companies who want
to use your project but don't want to dedicate the internal staff time to
become experts on same.

Every company that emails you asking you for help is a sales lead. "I'm happy
to implement/configure this for you. I charge $X per hour, and what you're
asking for is about Y hours of labor." To the client, X*Y is often cheaper
than the opportunity cost of pulling an engineer away from other work. Also,
don't be afraid to make X >> $100 if nobody else offers the same expertise.

You can do as much of this as you want, without changing anything about how
the software is licensed or packaged.

------
jmadsen
There are a few podcasts that have discussed this. Typically it is done via
support for existing OSS, offered to companies who need to be able to depend
on full knowledge & stability of that code. A couple of examples:

1) Redhat

2) "some guy" from one of the podcasts I can't think of at the moment who
forks Ruby and keeps a stable, supported version for his corporate clients,
while dealing with patches & upgrades on his own to his fork

In both of these cases, you can see that is isn't actually "how many users",
but "how many corporate users who need a service that keeps software X
completely stable and managed"

So I think from what you've said that it would be a good thing to look into.
You may want to contact the guys from
[http://www.tropicalmba.com/](http://www.tropicalmba.com/) for a few pointers
- this is right up their ally and they are very willing to discuss

~~~
gavinballard
RailsLTS ([https://railslts.com/](https://railslts.com/)) is probably the
product you're referring to in (2).

------
rushabh
I manage a small open source project
([https://github.com/frappe/erpnext](https://github.com/frappe/erpnext)) that
churns 100+k per year and helps me manage a small team. It took me 4-5 years
to reach here. We make money by providing hosting and also help to other
developers working on our platform.

I would start with a services plan and a beautiful website. If you are not a
designer, do hire one. Good design and quality can go a very long way towards
achieving your dream.

If your project is an app, you can also go the SAAS (softare-as-a-service)
way. But beware, building a multi-tenant platform, and working on user
onboarding, marketing your site can be 2x to 3x of your original project your
project.

The good thing is that once you are there, 1/2 years is a reasonable time,
this will only grow.

------
bestan
Yes, it is definitely realistic. We've seen several projects like Sidekiq
([http://sidekiq.org/](http://sidekiq.org/)) that did it.

Another quantitative indicator you can use is number of downloads on relevant
package manager (npm, PyPi etc.). These indicators only tell you how big your
audience is and not whether your project could provide income. However, having
big audience increase chances of success - you have a good position here.

Check out MinoHubs ([https://www.minohubs.com](https://www.minohubs.com)). We
provide tools that will help you get started with monetizing your project in
several ways very quickly. Let us know if you have any questions or if you're
missing anything.

------
sytse
It is less about how many stars you have an more about how many enterprises
use your software. GitLab has 15k stars on GitHub (we moved the canonical
source to GitLab itself a while ago) and more than 100k organizations are
using it. But most of our income is coming from larger enterprises in the
United States. It you can offer them extra features and market it properly you
can expect something like 1% of your users to sign up for a paid plan. Please
let me know if you have any questions.

------
dschiptsov
There is no sustainable way to monetize an open source project, except to
offer a "premium" service (which, unless you are comparable to Redhat by
market cap will probably unprofitable - I think Orable is losing money on
MySQL) or you offer closed source "enterprises" version, like so many do, but
it must be an exceptional tool, like nginx, varnish or nessus.

So I am very sceptical about monetization of community-driven momentum (the
moment you close the code it begins to stagnate and die). Unless you are
leader in your niche the chances for earning living from a project are close
to zero.

Wordpress or other themes is a different kind of offer.

------
jakejake
I have had a few open source projects with around 250k installs (web apps and
Wordpress plugins). One of them I was able to monetize for about $1k per
month. I was getting inundated with support requests so finally I created a
"product" by putting up a "buy now" button for $250 installation support. I
then ran some google ads to promote it. This was an encryption product so it
had business users.

If you make it easy for people to give you money and you have a useful product
then there usually will be a small percentage of users who will pay. But I'm a
firm believer that to make money you have to put effort into sales.

------
roel_v
Pipe dream.

a) 100k / year is not 'reasonable', it's _huge_ in microisv terms. The modal
revenue for independent software vendors is $0 (stats from payment
processors). To get there in 2 years is even less common.

b) The number of 'stars' has correlation r=0 with ability to monetize. I'd
even speculate - the more stars, the more ingrained in people's heads it is
'this is open source, ergo free', the harder it will be to make money. If
you're selling support for something only slightly popular, customers will
have no other options - but on support for Wordpress, you have to compete with
other devs, with 2$/hour rentacoder people, with Amazon selling 'teach
yourself Wordpress in 60 minutes' books etc.

c) What incentive do companies have to pay for it? You have to be able to
articulate it clearly before going down this path. Your wording makes me think
you are thinking 'this is my secret sauce, I can't give it away', which is
(frankly) very naive. If your idea is even a little bit good, you'll have to
stuff it down people's throats to accept it. I don't know of any business that
makes money OS software (on the software itself, not the consultancy around
it) without having a dual licensing model - GPL or commercial. And if that was
really a cash cow, Trolltech wouldn't have been sold a dozen times (or so)
over the last 10 years...

To judge whether your product has commercial potential, you need to

1) Describe your customers. In detail. Not just 'anyone using a database', but
'medium scale accounting businesses with on-premises case database' (idiotic
example, of course). You need to do this in such a way that you can derive a
strategy from it on how to find them. E.g., accountants meet at industry
events, where you could book a booth.

2) Identify a sample of, say, 100 of them, using the methods from step 1.

3) Start calling them. Preferably after you've taken a sales class (just 2
days will give you life changing insights, I promise). Not emailing, actually
talking to people. For the 100 from step 2, identify how many would buy your
product.

4) Get sales promises, 10 or 15 or so. People who you can excite so much about
your product that they promise (informally) 'yes, I'll buy this if you offer
it within 6 months' or whatever.

5) If you can't even do this, you have no (OK, 'barely any') hope of
succeeding.

The main skill you need is marketing to succeed at an endeavor like this. The
quality of your software, or its popularity amongst the crowd that uses
Github, is of secondary importance at best. That's not to say that you can
succeed with selling people crap product, snakeoil style, just that your life
as a software vendor is 10 or 20% of software development, at best (or worst,
depending on your perspective...)

~~~
mofeeta
Any particular sales class/course you'd recommend?

~~~
roel_v
No, I took one from a local small firm, I didn't arrange it so I didn't do
much research on it. I think the stuff we covered was so basic that anyone in
sales would go facepalm on how basic it was, and yet for us (room full of
engineers) it was so outside of what anyone of us knew, that it was one new
insight after the other. Also, it did a lot of role playing exercises, which I
find awkward but useful. I don't think it matter much which course somebody at
my level (0 sales skills) would take. It's similar to any high school teacher
being able to explain a linear function - you don't need a maths PhD for that.

------
joeblau
I have a little over 1000 stars (1044 at time of post) and have made $10 in
Bitcoin (Which is worth less than $10 now). That being said, my project is
extremely-side-projecty[1].

Others have discussed busies models, so it should be a simple calculation of
how much you can charge for a model vs how much it will cost you to run your
business and if you can live with the reminder after taxes etc... then I would
say do it.

[1] -
[https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io](https://github.com/joeblau/gitignore.io)

~~~
danieloaks
Just have to say, thank you very much for creating this. Use it every for
every single new repo I setup, saves loads of time. It's just awesome!

------
csomar
1 star. If you are starred by a big tech biz and they are willing to finance
you up to $250k/year (or maybe a million per year?) to keep the project
running and clean bugs by the very own creator of the project. Because your
project is handling infrastructure for them that runs a multi-million dollars
business.

100,000 star. If you are starred by your average to not-so-average (high or
low) developer. There is no clear monentization plan. But given the
popularity, ads and affiliates might bring you $1 per star (assuming a star is
40-50 visits/year).

Think about it. You have a bridge between Queens and Manhattan. I'm sure the
US, NYC and people are willing to finance, pay you, or buy you. For what-ever
big price (might be unreasonable too, to the cost of creation) you ask.

But if you have a bridge between Antarctica and the French Southern Antarctic
lands (just randomly picked), it'll be certainly an amazing and well-known
artefact but I'm not sure how you are going to finance it (especially that
Tourism is not huge there).

------
jbrooksuk
In regards to the GitHub stars, I don't think that a high amount of stars
actually correlates to the amount of people using the repository.

Cachet
([https://github.com/cachethq/cachet](https://github.com/cachethq/cachet)) has
2.6k stars but I know that the amount of installs is actually far higher.

~~~
jnbiche
Fair enough, and to be clear, I'm nowhere near 2.6k stars, although the
project has grown quickly with no promotion.

The only reason I pulled that particular indicator out of the hat was to
provide some reasonable benchmark for comparison.

But perhaps it was not a reasonable benchmark, after all.

~~~
e12e
I would think merged pull-request (aka community patches that doesn't suck)
would be a better indicator on gh - at least for open source project. Fixed
issues a close second.

~~~
jnbiche
Linux and LLVM have no merged pull requests on Github. And a lot of these
"Awesome x" (Node.js, Rust, Go, React, etc) will merge just about anything.

Also, I know of several project that fix tons of issues, but are relatively
unpopular (perhaps because they have so many issues?).

I think the bottom line is there are no perfect indicators of open source
project popularity.

~~~
e12e
Linux has lots of merged patches though. That they don't have merged prs isn't
surprising as they handle patches via email.

------
SwellJoe
I've got one data point for you, though I don't think you can guesstimate
income based merely on one factor, especially not github stars (we only have
295).

My company is based on Open Source software (Webmin, Virtualmin, Cloudmin, and
Usermin), and it sounds sort of similar to your situation. When we started the
company based on this stuff we had several major companies in our target
market (and we chose our target market, and chose to focus on Virtualmin
rather than other features of Webmin, because that market already knew us and
used our software in visible ways) using at least one of our projects, almost
a million downloads a year, and my co-founder and I had both been making a
decent living doing contract work based on it and writing about it.

Today, Webmin has about 1 million installations worldwide (and has grown to
~3.5 million downloads per year). We make enough money from our small
proprietary extensions to Virtualmin and Cloudmin to support three modest
salaries. It is not $100k/year for any of the three people working on it,
though it's not an outrageous dream to think we could get there..we've had
much better years than we're having this year or last year, however, so
revenue is not necessarily growing like gangbusters, despite our userbase
roughly tripling in the time the company has existed and still growing at a
comfortable clip annually. Ours is sort of an open core model, though the core
is very large (~500kloc) and the proprietary bits are very small (~20kloc),
which may be part of our revenue problem.

I think there are some things you're probably underestimating (not to say it
should discourage you, I'm just trying to open your eyes to some challenges
you will face that you might not expect):

When you sell Open Source software, support is your biggest value add, even if
you don't want to be a support company. Support costs a _lot_ of time and
money to do well. Time and money has to be balanced between making things
better and supporting existing users on the current version (true of
proprietary as well, but proprietary vendors don't have a million people using
the free version and expecting help). Growing the free user base (which can be
a side effect of having people working full-time on it) can paradoxically lead
to less time and money for making the software better. We fight this battle
all the time. To make our current customers and OSS users exceedingly happy
with our level of support is to severely limit our ability to deliver next
generation solutions. We run on such a shoe-string, and compete with such huge
players, that it's always a struggle to deliver both (and we fail plenty).

So, plan to hire someone to help you support the software, eventually. If we
were comfortable leaving our forums to "the community" and not bothering to
have an official company voice present every day helping answer the hard
questions, we could increase our own salaries by a lot (we pay our support guy
more than we pay ourselves), but I don't know that we'd continue to see the
growth we've seen in our user base, which we also value. We make things
because we want them to be used, not just because we want to make money.

Get used to having demands thrown at you every day. The level of documentation
and completeness and rapidity of development expected of a product is vastly
different than that of an Open Source project, or at least the way you have to
respond to it is different...even for users of the Open Source versions. We
have over 1,000 printed pages worth of documentation, plus a couple hundred
pages of online help, and still get complaints about our documentation
regularly. And, we have more "features" than any other product in our space,
including the two big proprietary competitors, and yet still get feature
requests all the time (and it's harder to say no than to just implement it,
which can hurt usability). A million users generates a lot of feedback. It's a
very high volume of demands to answer to. Ignoring them pisses people off,
saying no pisses people off, and saying yes often risks making the product
worse or more complex for the average user, hurting long-term growth. Even
saying, "Not right now" pisses people off. You're going to piss a lot of
people off, even if you're just trying to make the best software you can and
make a decent living.

I think what I'm trying to say is, think about it for a while before
committing to your plans. If you currently have steady income, hang on to it
while you sort out a few details.

Try to firm up what your users would pay for your value add. Try to figure out
how many of your users would pay for your value add. The only sure way to do
this is to actually have users pay you something for your value add.

Try to figure out how you will automate support (hint: You can't, because
automated support almost always sucks; even Google has awful automated
support, and they're good at almost everything.) At least figure out how you
will streamline it and offload it; have an active forum already? If not, get
one. Have a community of people talking about your software already? Get one.
If Open Source based business were a Pokemon, community would be its special
ability. So, you should start cultivating that now, even before money is
coming in.

~~~
e12e
Interesting to hear from someone both brave enough to bet on webmin, and lived
to tell the tale! :-) I'm afraid I don't have the best impression from webmin
etc - but then again I'm not the target customer.

Having had a look at your product page it strikes me that you seem to be under
pricing though? $99 seems _way_ cheap if you add any value at all. I suppose
it's a though market, but $500 or even $1000 sounds more reasonable. Loose
half customers, make more money, have fewer to support?

I'm guessing you've gone back and forth on this a lot; just hoping a
completely outside perspective might help - even if you end up going with your
current pricing model.

Best of luck!

~~~
SwellJoe
We're experimenting with lower pricing, at the request (demands) of a handful
of loud users. It has, so far, been a mistake. Revenue is down despite
increased sales...sales didn't increase enough to make up for the lower
prices.

Our previous pricing was $139 up to $499 for the first year of Virtualmin
Professional, depending on number of domains hosted, and renewals costing
about 1/3 that. Current prices are $99 to $249, I think. So, it is
significantly discounted.

This is also a bit of a stop gap while we rewrite our store and license
manager to accommodate monthly subscriptions and to better handle reseller
accounts (users who are hosting providers that buy many licenses and expect
steep discounts because our competitors provide steep discounts to hosting
providers). This all coincides with a migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7,
which has been a nightmare and has taken longer than every previous website
migration we've done, including two migrations from completely unrelated
content management systems and shopping carts.

Anyway, you're probably right about pricing. We'll decide after we launch the
new site and have ways to provide more flexibility in purchasing to our
various types of customer.

I'd like to hear about your poor impression of Webmin. What, specifically,
makes Webmin not something you would consider for your servers? I know about
some of the persistent myths that follow Webmin around: Insecure, breaks
things, incompatible with my favorite distro, ugly code (this is kinda true).
But, many of those come from grumpy hard-line command line administrators that
think no one should be allowed to be a system administrator if they can't do
it all in a shell...we'll never win those folks over. But, I still like to
know what negative things people think of Webmin and why they think it. I've
pretty much devoted my entire professional career to Webmin and things related
to it (my previous company also was based heavily on Webmin, and I wrote a
book about it). It matters a lot to me that it always gets better; and, it
matters to me that people are judging it on its actual merits (and flaws)
rather than inaccurate beliefs.

~~~
e12e
> This all coincides with a migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7, which has
> been a nightmare and has taken longer than every previous website migration
> we've done, including two migrations from completely unrelated content
> management systems and shopping carts.

Aww, I'm so glad I'm not on your team for that ;-) Even without following
Drupal closely I can imagine your pain: new programming/design patterns, new
php language features, major refactoring and a change to more modern rendering
pipeline, templates and perhaps a new caching layer on top of perhaps a
restructured data-layout? Am I close?

> I'd like to hear about your poor impression of Webmin. What, specifically,
> makes Webmin not something you would consider for your servers? I know about
> some of the persistent myths that follow Webmin around: Insecure, breaks
> things, incompatible with my favorite distro, ugly code (this is kinda
> true).

Mainly bad code and insecure (way back). But:

> But, many of those come from grumpy hard-line command line administrators
> that think no one should be allowed to be a system administrator if they
> can't do it all in a shell...we'll never win those folks over.

That's me ;-) As I said, not your target customer. Mainly I don't really want
the level of access webmin needs to be effective, exposed as a web service.
While that might be mostly religion at this point; I also realize that it
mostly makes sense if _no other core data_ is exposed as a web service. This
is obviously the case for many people and businesses. [ed: just not for me as
I _prefer_ ssh/the command-line]

So again, best of luck :-)

~~~
SwellJoe
Would two-factor authentication and certificate-based authentication help
alleviate some of those security concerns? Because Webmin has both of those.

We actually take security seriously, as any software that provides root-level
access to a million servers must, though I don't pretend we will ever be bug-
free or that we can ever guarantee security (even SSH has had major security
bugs). We're considering setting up some sort of bug bounty to help sniff out
security bugs, but haven't figured out how best to implement that.

~~~
e12e
I actually thought a bit about that after posting. I would be more inclined to
use a web based admin interface today, than just a few years ago; the TLS
stack is not as bad as it was; we've come further wrt ciphers - and the web
servers themselves have seen (more) hardening.

The thing is; I already use ssh. Adding another network service doubles the
attack surface.

Then there's the ux problem for browsers and certs. Using certs with ssh is
complicated enough (it's still on my todo-list, I use/require keys - but key
management is _not_ trivial for more than a handful of servers).

Ssh also finally have easy/proper 2fa support now: setting up totp+keys is
quite trivial. Add password+totp for sudo locally and you have half-decent ux
and security.

And while ssh _has_ had some security issues, it's been a while since the last
big one. In contrast with all the things that go wrong with web apps (xss,
session-hijack etc).

All that aside, certs+2fa (and the ability to disable pw auth) goes a long
way.

~~~
e12e
Btw for any other grumpkins reading; I just discovered scoop and found out
powershell seems to finally be usable in windows 8.1 pro even for part-time ms
users.

Run>powershell

    
    
      set-executionpolicy unrestricted -s cu
      iex (new-object net.webclient).downloadstring('https://get.scoop.sh')
      #yeah, I know - no signarure, code from curl...
      #but this is windows, beggars can't be choosers
      scoop bucket add extras #optional
      scoop install ssh
      

If you want oneget, it's in the extras-bucket iirc:

    
    
       scoop install oneget
    

But while scoop could use some love (eg vlc is a point release behind
oneget/chocolaty) -- it's _much_ nicer than the FindPackage mess IMNHO.

More at [http://scoop.sh](http://scoop.sh)

------
jakobegger
As others have said, the number of stars is irrelevant. The most important
factor for success is not the popularity of your project, but the problem it
solves, and whether there's a way to monetize it.

I started making money in 2011 with a GUI for an open source command line
tool. The open source software was available completely for free, but
compiling it was a hassle, using it was annoying because of a few serious
bugs, and you had to use it from the command line.

I made money by making an existing, free tool available to people who didn't
want to use the command line or compile their own software. I charged a modest
fee (initially just $5), and people gladly bought my app to solve their
problem. Nobody cared about the fact that it was open source and they could
have solved their problem for free; they just considered my app a fair deal.

(I still sell this app, MDB Viewer for Mac, but I've since completely
rewritten the open source library it depended on)

------
joelhooks
You've made fantastic steps towards making money from your project. It's use
in production shows that it has business value.

[http://nathanbarry.com/authority/](http://nathanbarry.com/authority/)

I think Nathan's book describes an excellent outline for success in this
regard. Basically you can look into "tiers". You give away "free" resources.
Blog posts and the liberally licensed open source software itself. You can
also paid resources. A book, perhaps screencasts that accompany the book for a
premium price. Workshops and onsite training provide another tier. At the very
top is consulting at ultra-premium rates.

This is oversimplified, but this is the idea. The "free" stuff is critical,
and builds the basis and "proof" for the paid offerings.

------
currentoor
It really depends on what the software does. I've mostly seen people make
money off of their open source software by consulting for companies that use
it. For example, I know a couple companies paid the creator of core.typed to
develop it further. But those were one off gigs, not recurring revenue.

------
z3t4
When you get the hype, for example front page of HN, that would probably be a
good indicator that it should be possible to make a living on it. It doesn't
even have to be your own project :P

There are excellent comments in this thread btw. I've bookmarked it.

------
rawnlq
What's your "good way to monetize it"? The typical approach I have seen is
selling support (paid custom features or forks) but that doesn't scale well.
You'll basically be a freelancer specializing in the project you wrote.

~~~
timharding
Note that he wants to create a lifestyle business, not a startup. Not sure how
important scalability is for that.

------
dllthomas
One star, if it's from the right person.

Revenue is number of people willing to pay you time the amount they're willing
to part with. Neither of those can be inferred from number of stars on a
GitHub page (it probably has the most correlation with the number of people
willing to pay, but there's going to be a scaling factor there that will vary
dramatically based on the nature of the project).

------
onion2k
If the project is popular because it's a free alternative to something that
costs then I imagine charging would kill it completely.

------
lukego
Is your goal to be paid to write your software? Have you considered looking
for a job where you would be paid to develop this software by a company that
needs it?

How do you envision your open source lifestyle business once it is up and
running? (do you want to be paid to develop software or are you hoping to make
a business that "runs itself"?)

------
raverbashing
Does your landlord or local supermarket accept stars on github as payment?

There's your answer

You need to provide a service connected to your project, this is regardless of
how many people use your project.

~~~
briandear
My local supermarket does! It's called GitPay. I just provide my github
username at checkout and they deduct starts from my repositories. The exchange
rate is roughly 10 euro per 26.2 stars. I generally get better rates at the
bank by the convenience of GitPay has made it hard to resist.

------
transit


------
curiously
My question for those that have spent years building a product:

Was it worth it open sourcing your product?

Did you get lot more leads and exposure?

I'm afraid of open sourcing because I'm not sure if it will do anything for
me, and that I'm giving away years of work away for free.

~~~
anarazel
I think working on open source, both unpaid and paid, projects definitely has
been worth it for me professionally. Independent of self gratification and
such (rather important IMO), it has lead to offers for interesting jobs and by
that increased what kind of remuneration I could get. Above what I think the
additional years of experience themselves would incur.

I think it's harder to answer that on the angle of open sourcing projects.
I've, together with colleagues, spent the last few years doing paid for
feature development for an open source projects. It's possible to have a
company around that and support, and grow. But it's not easy.

My impression, more from the side lines, being a technical person occasionally
involved in sales, is that it help in lead generation, but that the conversion
ratio tends to be lower than with leads for a closed product.

~~~
curiously
>My impression, more from the side lines, being a technical person
occasionally involved in sales, is that it help in lead generation, but that
the conversion ratio tends to be lower than with leads for a closed product.

This is what I'm seeing. Even when I had free trials, vast majority of people
were just free loaders, some even going as far as using a prepaid card to get
past the requirement.

Which is why I'm hesitant to jump on the Open source wagon, I don't want an
army of freeloaders now demanding and whining, like I see all the time on
github.

~~~
anarazel
On the other hand lead generation is cheaper...

I think it's hard to answer you questions without more information about the
type of product. My impression is that plays a large role in viability. ISTM
infrastructure type pieces have a bigger chance to open source successfully.

