JobberBase: open-source platform for job sites. How to make it a business?

[filipcte]

3 years ago I created jobberBase, an open-source platform for building job sites.

It's fairly successful, there are hundreds of sites powered by it (others existed but disappeared in time), we have an active community, freelancers build custom extensions... it's a good environment. However, we've never made any money with it and it has stagnated for about a year, in terms of development, because there aren't any incentives to continue to develop it.

I'm looking for options, because it's a pitty to just see it exist out of inertia and other people's interest.

What would you do with it? How would you build a business on top of it?

Thanks, I'd appreciate any insights!

http://www.jobberbase.com/

[davidroetzel]

Three approaches come to mind:

1) Sell professional support

This is how most open source software companies make money. This usually includes some horrendous subscription fee and guaranteed SLAs.

I never quite understood, why this works. My only explanation is, that many customers are comfortable with this, because this is what they are used to from buying proprietary software.

2) Sell a hosted version

This is classic SaaS. If you find a way to automate setup of instances of your software and offer this for an attractive price, this could appeal to people who shy away from the cost of running their own server and installing and maintaining the software.

I firmly believe that SaaS and Open Source do not contradict each other, but I only know one example that seems to be successful: http://www.teambox.com

3) Open Core

Sell a paid version of your software that has features not in the open source version. This is generally frowned upon by open source people, and rightfully so. At least you run the risk of destroying the healthy developer community you seem to have.

In your case, I would gather that you have a huge advantage when it comes to choosing the right approach. If you know who owns the hundreds of sites that already run your software then you already know some of your potential customers.

Talk to them and try to find out why they use your software, if they make any revenue of it, what their pain points are (if any) and what they would be willing to pay for.

[runT1ME → davidroetzel]

>This is how most open source software companies make money. This usually includes some horrendous subscription fee and guaranteed SLAs. I never quite understood, why this works. My only explanation is, that many customers are comfortable with this, because this is what they are used to from buying proprietary software.

I think Jonathan Schwartz had a decent answer to this question. It was basically that there are two types of customers, the kind with more time than money, and the kind with more money than time. If your company stands to lose thousands of dollars for an hour of downtime, minutes, isn't paying a subscription fee with 24 hour support worth it, even if it's almost never utilized?

Another way to make money is to backport bug fixes to previous versions that customers are on. With companies who have more time than money, this won't bother them, they can compile their own versions and do their own merges of bug fixes. For companies making boatloads of cash, why waste developer effort doing this for a negligible fee?

[filipcte → davidroetzel]

Thank you, great insight! I think I'll go ahead and contact existing users and see if there's a business opportunity there.

Regarding the 3 approaches:

1. Support is tough and it's not scalable. Maybe we could make a living out of it, but barely stay afloat.

2. We've actually built a prototype of a hosted version, but when we looked at the numbers (cashflow projections), they didn't look too good. However, it's still the one approach I believe can work.

3. Oh, we did that almost 2 years ago and it was a disaster. We created a premium version, with a few important extra features, and sold licenses. We sold 5 of them in 2 months. Our focus shifted towards the premium version and we neglected the open-source version. The community was angry, we were loosing "karma" and not even earning money.

[noodle → filipcte]

1) support isn't scalable, but if you're looking to pull yourself out of stagnation, then you shouldn't discount options just because they won't scale well.

2) this is the option that scales the best. how long ago did you look at the numbers? hosting something like this is quite cheap, and this is the option that gives you the most possibilities to monetize with multiple levels of plans.

3) sounds like a management issue to me, not an issue with the concept

edit: i've worked with jobberbase and submitted fixes to it in the past, and i've worked with other job board software. i've seen people drop thousands of dollars on terrible, outdated job board software without even having a full license or support. you have a market if you can just reach it. jobberbase isn't easy to find unless you go digging and know what you're looking for. most people who are looking to host a new job board do not know what they're looking for.

[viandante]

Hi,

it is difficult to give good advices without some data. As first thing, I would suggest to honestly ask your "customers" what would they pay for.

Maybe you can propose some new features and bug fixes only when you reach a certain ammount of donations (I mean, this is kind of the way the Diaspora guys made their money). If your target is developers, then to ask them money you may want to tell them how much time would they save with your new module or version. If a developer understands your new module would save him 3 hours of work, why shouldn't he pay for, let's say, as much as 1 hr of work is worth for him?

Finally, from my point of view, developers are easily the most price sensitive. So, another point would be: would it be possible to find another audience? Let's say small companies who may enjoy having their own job board?

[ig1]

Turn it into SaaS, charge a small monthly fee for the basic stuff (hosting, domains, etc.) and take a percentage cut from job posting fees.

At the moment your only likely to appeal to a very limited technical audience, if you made it so anyone could setup a job board you'd likely get a lot more customers.

[WillyF]

Why not use your own software to create niche job boards? Not only will it generate revenue streams, but it will also help you better understand your customers and further improve your software.

[filipcte]

Clickable: http://www.jobberbase.com/