Going open source with SaaS
I'm running Machine Learning Service - https://mljar.com - it can accept data in flat CSV file and train machine learning model (solving binary classification or regression problems). The service is not very popular. I'm thinking about going open source with it. I would like to give it for free for students, researchers (they should be ok with running docker-compose on their machine). I hope to get much bigger attention of users by doing it - it will be some kind of advertisement (I'm bootstrapping, dont have big money to buy ads, go conferences). I'm planning to have similar business model as redash.io (open source + hosted SaaS).
What do you think about such move?
Link to my product on IH: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/mljar
I think open-sourcing can help, but it likely won't be enough by itself. You will likely want to work on getting developers excited and somehow get them to contribute plugins of some sort to your engine. At the very least doing this will help you build credibility.
However, your target market is non-technical people. Ad busy and going to conference are only some of the promotion strategies that you can use. One easy option might be to do a series of blog posts (on your site and on other people's sites) that help non-technical do just enough ML.
You are right! Engaging other developers to contribute with new plugins will be a challenge. I was thinking about making integrations to various SaaS platforms to make them machine learning enabled (simple example, can be revenue forecasting for Stripe). It will be like Zapier but for Machine Learning.
I love the 'like Zapier but for Machine Learning'. Best of luck with making it happen!
Hi 👋 Piotr, I'm currently working as a ML&DL engineer in company that work with a lot of data, so hope my thoughts will be useful for you. For non tech users importing CSV and get results/prediction will be something really cool and magical 🧞♂️, but suddenly there's not a lot of people that could understand how it works and how you should treat a data, which preprocessing to do to clean it, how to deal with missing, unbalanced data and etc. And I'm not even talking about performance measuring technics like cross validation and metrics 😜.
So what I can suggest is to try to apply business model similar to one of our partners which is platform that called DeepDetect 🤖 https://www.deepdetect.com/, so they have OpenSource project and what they actually do is consulting and supporting services, which is works pretty well for them. That will be good model to start, after you can add some other features to your platform, for example you will train models for your platform and propose them as SaaS.
Cheers
Hi Evgeny! You are 100% right! For non-tech users running analysis on CSV is like a magic. Supporting and consulting services should be very good here! Thank you very much! :)
I believe the open source is great.
But to keep your head above the water you need to make money from it.
So the solution is to give users some very unique experience and value that can't be obtained through the open code, or it's hard to get. It's not easy to think out what it could be but it's doable, no doubts.
Do you already have paid customers?
G'luck!
Thank you for feedback!
Yes, I already have few paying customers. (my stripe revenue is here https://www.indiehackers.com/product/mljar).
I would like to provide open source version which will be configured for single user account and single-server. There will be paid hosted version where you can create multiple-users accounts (organizations) and compute on multiple-servers. And there will be commercial license for on-premise deployment with multi-user accounts and multi-server.
When running machine learning hyper-parameters tuning jobs difference in speed for single vs multiple servers is huge.
Actually, I like your service. I thought about something like that before I started my project :)
You are on the right track, I think.
Hi. Me and a colleague from my office were working on a very similar project with yours, but we eventually decided to quit on it (for a variety of reasons) and pivot to open-source tools for researchers (none public yet and we slowed down a lot due to our PhD workload). Psst, MLJAR was even in the competitors list, haha.
Would you like to have a chat?
Regarding open-sourcing - I think it'a great move, this business model works well for plenty of projects.
Wow - for me that's sound like a big achievement - to be on someone competitors list :) I would love to chat with you! I would like to know why you quit on this idea (main reasons)? What kind of tech stack were you using? Please send me email: contact@mljar.com What is your PhD thesis? ;)
There is nothing to loose by open-sourcing it. Check the AGPL license, since it is what you may want to do in order to protect others offering a service based on your code (IF that is what you want, of course).
It is a non-traditional approach and therefore it makes a lot of people scared. However, I believe is is a good way of generating traction in a community that is used to open source. Wordpress is a great example because it has proved its value over time. Git is another great one. Git is not making money per se but you have Github, Gitlab and Bitbucket built on top of it, and Gitlab is open source itself.
So, to make it short, I believe that open-sourcing wouldn't be the fact that ruins your business. Not every business idea can be a successful one. If it fails, at least you would leave something more than a 404Error on a website.
Thank you!
Machine learning community is very open source oriented. I've created the service based on open source algorithms. It will be nice to give something back!
Open sourcing gets interesting if there are extra you can sell on top. https://sidekiq.org is a great example. Base product is free. I pay $1700 a year for the some extra business features.
The sidekiq was inspiration for me!
What is more, I have a concern, what if there will be pull request with business feature to open source github repo. I've emailed Mike Perham about it: he wrote to me that such thing never happend to him while maintaining sidekiq for years.
Who is your customer? Will the availability of your project as open-source erode your ability to monetize it? A little bit is not a problem, that is to be expected.
Open-sourcing a good project can raise the profile of your project but you should approach this aspect as a product too. Think of ways to market it and make sure to support your users.
Thanks Boris! You punched my second problem - who is target customer.
Right now, using mljar is cumbersome. You need to upload CSV file to train ML and upload second file for computing predictions (or access model vie REST api, so do some scripting).
I would like to target for small/medium buisnesses that would like to apply Machine Learning. I would like to make it easy as a Zapier to connect data with Machine Learning. For example: connect MLJAR with Stripe to forecast revenue for next months and connects it with your user base to predict churn and use it for customer segmentation.
Like all things in business, it can help, but don't expect any miracles :)
I started https://brisaboards.com as an open source project for multiple reasons:
The results? I'm not sure yet. I'm definitely more open to talking and posting about it, so that's been a huge plus for me.
My biggest post so far was to r/opensource on reddit, and the results weren't that great: ~1.3k post views, 15 upvotes, 40 visits, 2 comments from users. And nobody clamoring to install the software :)
But I have a lot of hope that being more open to publicizing my project will help get people interested, get feedback, and move the project in the right direction.
The downside, of course, is the Redis problem: If it is useful and popular, someone else can package it up. Also, the place where you're most likely to make money - businesses - will often have the admin skills to install it for free.
Good luck with your brisa project!
I was scared about turning into open source:
Would AGPL stop someone like Amazon/Google from providing a free installer? Not disagreeing with your license (I wanted to go GPL as well, but decided not to), just not sure.
Thanks, and good luck to you as well!
You're right, AGPL will no stop Amazon/Google from providing free installer. I would be extremely happy if they do such. The open source version would be a good starting point (some sort of free trail, but on your machine). I believe this will turn into great boost for sales of commercial version.
I know what you mean :) I'm about 99% sure nobody has installed mine, and I'd be pretty happy if it happened!
If you ever want to bounce ideas off each other, feel free to send me an e-mail.