
Show HN: I've open-sourced my ERP SaaS, Stockor - nathanstitt
For the last several years I&#x27;ve been creating a ERP platform, Stockor.  While I&#x27;m going to continue offering it as a SaaS, I&#x27;ve decided to also open-source it.<p>I&#x27;m hopeful that by doing so it will:
 1) Grow it into a Wordpress size juggernaut with a plugin for any business process under the sun.
 2) Bring me interesting consulting gigs.<p>The open-source site is at stockor.org.  There&#x27;s a demo up at stockor.com&#x2F;demo as well.<p>Looking forward to hearing HN&#x27;s thoughts!
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gizmo
The demo doesn't look bad, but it seems to suffer from design-by-programmer.
It also seems like the stockor.com website is more of an afterthought, even
though it's a critical part of your sales funnel (other ERP vendors can afford
to have a lousy website because they do face-to-face sales).

You can make a ton of money in the ERP business, even if your product isn't
very good. So if you're losing hope that stockor.com is going to bring in
serious money anytime soon, it's probably because you need to focus _way more_
on your onboarding experience and quality of the stockor.com website.

~~~
nathanstitt
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that that's a 100% accurate assessment, since
well, it was designed by programmer.

I haven't lost hope on stockor.com at all. I'm hoping that the open-source
version will drive additional attention to stockor.com and I'll pick up more
customers from it.

The basic problem I've ran into is credibility with customers. They're
understandably reluctant to trust their entire business to some guy over the
internet. I believe that if I can point out that the code is open and they can
always migrate to running it themselves it should alleviate their reluctance.

Really it's kind of a no-brainer to pay me to host it at a few hundred a month
vs hiring an IT guy.

~~~
blakerson
You can build trust! Blogs, email, the usual advice all applies, but you may
also consider getting a professional take on design or at least adopting a
framework (Bootstrap/Foundation).

People can spend plenty of time arguing the merits of those frameworks, but
they were pretty much built for guys like you who are programmers and could
use opinionated UI that's passed review in someone's design department. Use a
theme/skinning site like bootswatch.com to throw in some variety with
colors/typography and still have some thought put in the small details like
"what should be the relative difference between your font sizes?"

Between your personal branding and the impressions created by first glances at
your product, you can have some easy wins with credibility.

~~~
nathanstitt
Well, I am using Bootstrap. But didn't want to have the Yet Another Bootstrap
site look. Guess maybe I should have left well enough alone...

In fact the website is built entirely on bootstrap and Backbone.js Using my
liquid_assets gem I've managed to make it searchable as well. I use the sass
version of Bootstap and allow the user to modify the colors from the
management side.

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yebyen
Is it a coincidence that the page says

"It's 11 o'clock in the morning, do you know where your inventory is?" and I'm
reading the page at 11 o'clock? Creepy

Everything looks very polished, I've never worked with an ERP before but I
didn't know it could include your customer-facing website and process orders
directly. I guess that's what ERP is for...

~~~
nathanstitt
Nope, that's done with JS to your time zone. Didn't mean for it to be creepy,
was going more for humorous.

Thanks for the kind words! Once I get it all finalized I'm also hopping for
additional plugins to extend it way beyond ERP. Time trackers - I'm looking at
you.

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pinaceae
Interesting attempt.

Key questions I would immediately ask an ERP vendor that I do not see answered
on your homepage:

\- What kind of interfaces/APIs does Stockor provide? Both for in-house
systems (analytics, whatever) as well as externals (EDIFACT, etc.).

\- Is there some sort of pricing engine to fully calculate an order? How
flexible is it?

I assume this is US only? If not, then what about languages, currencies, etc?

~~~
nathanstitt
Good points. I don't cover that at all on the landing page.

It is 100% API driven using a a JSON REST api. As part of the open-sourcing
process I'll be documenting that, but it isn't currently documented at all.

The pricing engine is lacking compared to other ERP implementations. Right now
it does per-customer pricing with quantity breaks, but it doesn't have the
concept of pricing libraries like others do. I do have experience implementing
those but just haven't gotten it done yet. I agree that'll be really important
for larger enterprises.

It is US only at the moment, mainly because I have no experience with VAT and
European accounting. If someone was willing to work with me on it to discuss
how it all works that'd be awesome...

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pointilist
Looks really comprehensive. It's impressive. It's been a while since I've been
in this domain so I can't comment on the functionality, but the look and feel
of the demo is quite good. Like others have stated, the main site could use a
professional touch.

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andersthue
I am using an online ERP, the trust to do that came because my accountant used
it.

He liked it because he have access to my data without the need to come to my
office.

So you might try to get accountant/bookkeepers to like it so they can be your
trustbuilders!?

~~~
nathanstitt
Yeah, I've been in talks with my accountant on what would be take to interest
accounts. Quickbooks has a neat feature where they package up all the postings
and send them to the accountant.

~~~
andersthue
If you get one accountant to use it, it could equal 10-?? Clients if he pushes
it to his (new) clients...

Of course, getting an accountant is probably a harder sell ;)

~~~
nathanstitt
Yep. I've done a decent amount of research into why quick books is so
prevalent and "accountant support/recommendations" is the main reason.

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callesgg
Look very nice. Looks allot like Pimcore
[http://pimcore.com](http://pimcore.com)

The demo stuff was laking good test data on most pages. That was my initial
thought.

~~~
nathanstitt
Thanks!

I've auto-generated the data using the Ruby Faker gem and the API. I would
like to locate better product descriptions and images but haven't been able to
find a good open source for them yet.

The scripts I used to do so are at: [https://github.com/argosity/stockor-
scripts](https://github.com/argosity/stockor-scripts)

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ing33k
do you think this can be used by a small scale manufacturing industry as an
Internal ERP ? ( there no need for Store sort of thing ). Reason I am asking
is that I had to do a very basic inventory management app for a friends
mechanical industry, just generated some models in rails and used an admin
panel gem to generate the app..

[https://github.com/nighthawk-apps/sERP](https://github.com/nighthawk-
apps/sERP)

~~~
nathanstitt
It could be with a little more work. I don't currently support manufacturing,
but do have kitting. You can have one SKU depend on multiple SKU's so that if
one is ordered it'll place the sub SKUS as well.

For proper manufacturing we'd have to expand that to generate a build order
and factor labor into the GL postings.

It's on my informal roadmap but no idea when/if it'll get done. If you're
interested in sponsoring that, I'd love to talk! (nathan@argosity.com)

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dougaitken
Having a 2 second look at the demo, it looks like a lot of useful kit. But
what makes this different to other software, or indeed compared to Shopify and
the like?

~~~
nathanstitt
Great point. The main difference is that Shopify is great at e-commerce but it
stops there.

Stockor handles the entire supply chain from purchasing inventory to managing
it and customer relations. You'd use Stockor to manage all your business
processes behind the scenes.

Now that stocker's open-source I'd expect someone to write a shopify adapter
for it. I've got an Amazon one already written that I'll be releasing soon.

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2810
Just curious, how much revenue it has generated up to date?

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lubos
I love the roadmap gauge on your website, can I steal it?

~~~
nathanstitt
Awesome! Glad you liked it. I've opened sourced the website as well, it's all
built as a static site using Ruhoh.rb and the source is at:
[https://github.com/argosity/stockor-
dotorg](https://github.com/argosity/stockor-dotorg)

You'll probably want to check out the _root/index.html and stylesheets/os-
progress.scss for the gauge.

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PhasmaFelis
Stockor was my favorite He-Man toy. He had pallet jacks for hands! I think his
sold-separately vehicle was a shipping container.

~~~
nathanstitt
Hmm I wasn't aware of that when I named the product. I was going more for
Stock (as in inventory) and Operating Room.

I'm in talks with a designer for a dinosaur themed logo though since something
about the name sounds like Raptor and I think that might be kinda neat.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
That was a joke, in case it wasn't clear. :) He-Man had lots of characters
with imaginative names like Spikor and Stinkor (whose gimmick was that the toy
smelled really bad).

~~~
nathanstitt
You know I did wonder if it was, since I googled it and didn't find anything
:) The name does kinda have that sound, which made me wonder about it. :)

