

Bushido (YC S11): An App Store For The Web That Can Kickstart Your Side Projects - sgrove
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/29/yc-funded-bushido-an-app-store-for-the-web-that-can-kickstart-your-side-projects/

======
did
I'm Didier Lafforgue, the guy behind LocomotiveCMS, one of the 2 first open
source projects handled by Bushi.do. So I will speak for the open source
developer inside me. I won't say that building an open source project is quite
easy but the coding part is definitively the easiest one for me.
Unfortunately, a developer does not live with fresh water and (coding) love.
So when Sean and Kevin came to me and shared with me their vision about
monetizing open source projects, it was obvious I had no choice than to say
yes. Simply because their idea is brillant. Actually, it lets the freedom for
the authors of open source web applications to continue their development
roadmap and at the same time, Bushi.do provides all the tools to promote and
monetize the applications. I see that as a win-win situation. And to go
further, that could be become a game changer in the world of the open source
web applications. One last thing, the 2 guys behind Bushi.do are developers
first and very nice guys....

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rwolf
Click link to Bushido in TC story -> click "Sign up" -> click "Learn more" ->
back at contentless splash page.

I can take Jason Kincaid's word for it and sign up, or Bushido can actually
tell me something, anything, about what it is.

~~~
sgrove
Hey Ryan, sorry for the contentless splash page. We're building up the
platform and documentation right now, and as we get closer, the work on that
side gets even more intense. We'll put up a video explaining everything later
tonight.

In the meantime, we're launching Bushido as a really simple way to launch
Open-source rails apps with one click, a unified log-in system, and premium
hosting. We do a revenue share with the developers, so all you do is write the
app, put up a link that has the url to your rails' app git repo, which branch
to deploy from, and any environmental variables you want the app to launch
with (so you can customize it at launch time), and then anyone can instantly
launch the app. If they end up converting to premium hosting (based on a few
factors like number of allowed user signins and apps), we'll split the revenue
with you.

The goal is to help developers be more and more independent working on their
projects of passion, and to app users way more choice in the apps they can
use.

Let me know if you have any more questions, s@gobushido.com!

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callmeed
I remember when Bushido made the front-page of HN a few months ago (search for
details). I was pretty pumped then and am even more so now.

One thing that's been on my mind lately is help desk software. The current
leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 _per month per agent_ –are you
serious?) [1], especially when it's best for everyone at a startup to wear the
support hat now and then. Not to mention the fact that some lock in your data.

We once used a home-built ticket system for support (a Rails 2.3.x app that's
available at <https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help>). I'm seriously
considering re-writing this app in Rails 3.1 and putting it up on Bushido. The
biggest feature request I've seen is the ability to handle incoming emails as
tickets, and that's now easy with MailGun or SendGrid.

All that to say I think Bushido could really disrupt some industries (even
recent ones) that are over-priced or handcuff customers with arbitrary limits.

\---

[1]

<http://uservoice.com/plans> <http://www.zendesk.com/signup>
<http://www.assistly.com/pricing> <http://www.freshdesk.com/pricing.html>

~~~
pwim
_The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are
you serious?)_

I'm assuming these services are targeting companies with people working full
time on support, where that $9 to $49 is a drop in a bucket compared to their
salary.

~~~
callmeed
That's the problem. Even small startups use them. Imagine a 4-person startup
with 2 co-founders, another engineer and another designer. No full-time
support staff, so everyone jumps in from time to time. Unless you make a
generic agent account (which is lame for assignment/follow-up), you're talking
$100/mo for support.

I don't discount the value extracted but to me it reeks of enterprise, per-
seat licensing a bit.

I just think an OS, unlimited agent option would be nice for small startups.

~~~
wheels
As someone who sits on the other side of that equation, $9/month basically
translates to "1 support request per month".

I've been meaning to do a blog post on such, but an average single support
request costs us around $8. So if you've got a business where the average
number of support requests per user are dramatically less than 1.0 per user
per month, then it can work out, but I suspect there's a proportional support
load to those SaaS systems that you're looking at where it's closer to, say,
0.5 per seat. If you lower the price beyond $9/month, then all of the sudden
your profit evaporates.

It's non-obvious until you run the numbers, but it goes something like this:

    
    
      Support Person Salary		$60,000.00
      Fully Loaded Employee Cost	$90,000.00
      Per Hour			$46.88
      Support Requests / Hour	6
      Cost / Request		$7.81
    

That's actually why we removed our $9/month plan. It was just hard to get
excited about helping someone out when you realized after the first mail you
were going into the hole for such.

The interesting thing for where Bushido fits into that is that in some ways
it'd be pushing things towards utility pricing (the same way a lot of the
cloud sort of stuff has done) -- i.e. the cost of supporting a software stack
would be proportional to the cost you generate further up the chain, rather
than based on some metric of an "average customer".

~~~
biot
If I built a product that allowed you to answer support requests 10% faster,
then logically you'd be happy paying an additional $750/month per support
person for the software?

~~~
wheels
• No, you can't set your pricing to capture all of the theoretical value that
your product creates. Otherwise it's a wash. Also, there's friction in any
system, so you not only have to create value (that I get to keep), but do so
enough to justify the switching costs.

• No, not unless you have no competitors. And if you have a generic solution
to lower support costs by 10%, if you don't have competitors now, you will
soon.

• No, software pricing isn't rational. Oh, how I wish it were at times. But in
general, unless you're an amazing salesman, your prices have to be at a level
that to the customer feel "about right".

------
chc
I thought it sounded intriguing until I realized your entire codebase has to
be public. Are there actually any popular SaaS products that are 100% open-
source? Releasing open-source components and libraries spun off from your app
is one thing, but open-sourcing the whole codebase that constitutes the core
of your business? Is that done?

~~~
SingAlong
Like sean said, " _it won't be for everyone_ ", but there's already a ton of
OpenSource apps in Ruby alone (mentioning it coz thats what we support right
now) that are old but still work fabulously and are useful.

Example: Mockr (<https://github.com/causes/mockr-old>). A sweet app that lets
you share and review designs among teams (and as per last check, it was
unmaintained). We ported it to Bushido with a few extra lines of code and it's
here <https://github.com/HashNuke/mockr>

If you have apps like these, that you think others would find useful, mail me
(akash@gobushido.com) and I'll help you with porting it to Bushido. And if you
are using Devise for auth, we have a plugin and it's 5 lines of code promise!
Most apps that we've ported, we've ensured that they work fine outside of
Bushido too (opensource is giving back. right? :)

------
mshafrir
I remember first reading about Bushido at
<http://swombat.com/2011/4/12/bushido>. After reading the blog post, I gave
Bushido a spin, and their service really felt like magic. I got to know this
team as part of the YC S11 batch, and they're building an awesome company
that's giving back to open source. Lots of good things in their future.

------
relix
A good concept, I hope their execution will be excellent and they have some
marketing skills, because the latter is what will be hardest in this sector.
Everyone can make a single sign-on platform with benefits, but getting those
customers - now therein lies the rub.

I hope you guys succeed, because I would love to integrate with such a
platform.

~~~
SingAlong
_I hope you guys succeed, because I would love to integrate with such a
platform._

You don't have to wait. Just get back to me at akash@gobushido.com and I'll
help you port your Rails apps to Bushido. Bonus points if you are using Devise
coz we have a plugin for it that makes it so much easier.

------
aashay
This may be somewhat petty but...isn't using the term "App Store" a bit risky?
Apple owns the trademark on that:
<http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html>

It's lame, I know, but better safe than sorry.

~~~
chc
Apple is currently involved in a legal battle over whether it legitimately
owns that mark and has failed to get injunctions against its use.

------
collint
I think it sounds like a wicked clever idea.

It also sounds like a recipe for bad-blood in the open source world. It
emphasizes owning a repo rather than contributing to one that already exists.

It also seems to push for over utilization of resources. Once you get to say
1-10K installs a multi-tenant solution would probably make more sense. What
happens then? Does bushido help you roll your customers into one big app? Even
if it's not good for bushido's bottom line?

Don't get me wrong, I see a lot of good and interesting things coming from
this. I just also see some sticky situations.

~~~
SingAlong
_It emphasizes owning a repo rather than contributing to one that already
exists._

Something that's been under discussion for a while at Bushido.

 _Does bushido help you roll your customers into one big app?_

No. Each instance of an app runs in it's own sandboxed environment. That helps
you keep your app simple and not worry about scaling for those 10k users. If
you want a simpler perspective to look at the service - it sort of provides
web apps like mobile apps. Separate instances like how they run on your phone.
So tomorrow if there's an online editor app (like Google Docs. Just saying...)
on Bushido and you have a Chromebook-like device, you can launch your own
instance and that'll all be yours like a separate app. Once there's support
for more platforms it'll be easier to see it as "app store for the web". All
apps on the web and all you do is launch an instance of apps for yourself.

P.S: I work for Bushido

------
Mizza
Cool!

I'm about to launch something (hopefully going live tonight, announce
tomorrow) with a similar philosophy - the economic engine of Open Source needs
some more octane!

Hope this takes off, I hope I can partner with these guys in the future.

~~~
sgrove
Definitely let us know, would love to hear about it. Anything that helps
developers and users makes us very happy :)

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tebeka
Great idea, now I just need to learn some RoR ...

Seriously, this is something that can have the same effect on application as
the web had on publishing. "Just write it and place it out there ...".

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highace
Woah, they take a 15-40% cut? Is it just me who thinks that's pretty
significant? I think I'd rather just bite the bullet and do it myself.

------
angryasian
sounds like too much vendor lock in with proprietary solutions for my taste,
but can see the benefit for some projects out there.

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shpoonj
They still have an awesome mobile presence... Oh wait.

