

Companies Who Make Money: Virtualmin (YC winter 07) - agentbleu
http://thenextweb.org/2008/09/01/ep1-companies-who-make-money-virtualmin/

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maximilian
Summary: Author doesn't know linux and apparently used Virtualmin's product to
avoid learning it.

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SwellJoe
Hooray! We love it when that happens.

In all seriousness, though, being the Open Source nerds that we are, we
cleverly trick our users into learning lots of interesting stuff about Apache
and Linux and other stuff. When things need to be complex (as things
occasionally do in a virtual hosting deployment) we don't make up our own
complexities and leaky abstractions and slap them on top of the existing ones
--we allow the user to see through to the Apache/Postfix/BIND complexities.
For example, with redirect rules and match patterns. Very basic match patterns
can be setup automagically, with very little effort...but when things get
complex, the user can dig down to see the actual Apache rules. Likewise for
almost all of the services we manage, if the user _needs_ fine-grained control
they can get to it without having to completely break out of the comforting
Virtualmin UI. Baby steps to system administration competence.

We also spend a lot of time in our forums talking about the whys and
wherefores rather than just the "Click here, click there, and save it".

We genuinely love the software our products manage (mostly). And we've both
written books on the topic of system administration, in total ~1100 printed
pages, which have now been combined into a massive wiki (
<http://doxfer.com/Webmin> ) and that's also a pretty good source of traffic
and potential buyers for our products. Interestingly, our books are still
selling a reasonable amount five years after publication (folks like tangible
products, I guess).

We actually view education as a good marketing tool. The more people know
about system administration, the more they'll understand why our products are
dramatically better than cPanel or Plesk. The first time someone hits the
command line with our competitors products they'll learn a hard lesson in the
difference between template generated configuration files, and a product that
understands the configuration files and respects non-generated directives and
comments and file order. People don't go back to other products after spending
enough time with Virtualmin and Webmin.

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lbrandy
So wait. He doesn't know Linux and he wanted a GUI front-end for apache. So he
downloaded a free gpl'd product from Virtualmin. But this is a blog about
companies who make money. How do they make money?

~~~
SwellJoe
We have a color copier in the shed out back printing money. The whole software
thing is just a clever ruse.

Actually, we have both an Open Source version and a proprietary version. The
proprietary version adds a few nice features, primarily in automating
installation of about 85 popular web applications, as well as some other
features related to making money with virtual hosting systems. And, it has a
price, and people pay us money in exchange for the software.

I don't know the author (I don't think, though maybe I've talked to him on our
forums or issue tracker; we have 1400 or so paying customers, and many
thousands of Virtualmin GPL users, I can't really keep up), but we're happy to
have him as a Virtualmin GPL user, regardless of whether money changes hands,
and not just because he wrote a really nice blog post about us. We have
absolute confidence that if ever he _does_ need the features that Virtualmin
Professional offers, he'll buy from us. We've found the single best marketing
we can do is to get people to try our Open Source projects...nothing else is
as good an indicator of whether they'll eventually buy our product than use of
Webmin, Usermin and Virtualmin GPL. Which is good news, since we have several
million Webmin users that haven't bought anything from us yet.

So, perhaps the interesting question will be whether we can build a company
bigger than Parallels (or even cPanel) on a mostly Open Source basis. We're
doing OK, so far, and growing at a nice pace, but nothing anyone would point
to as an overnight success. But, we'll see.

Anyway, the author is not mistaken. We do make money, and the amount of money
that we make is increasing at a respectable pace. It's enough money that I
feel like my initial optimism about the business was well-founded (I feel like
I picked the winner from among my stable of ideas) but not enough that I can
slack off. So, it's probably just the right amount of money for this company
at this stage.

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lbrandy
Thanks for the answers and reminding me why I love this site.

It's great to hear about success stories like this especially using the dual-
license model.

