First sale of $1,500 after 4 years hard work!
I've spent almost 4 years building the headless commerce platform Vendure. It's a developer-focused framework for building e-commerce apps and in that time it has gained quite a bit of traction - it is being used by IBM as well the billion-dollar startup Swile, and an increasing number of smaller businesses.
Vendure is free open-source software, and the plan has always been to build up adoption and then offer paid plugin extensions which cover more complex use-cases.
I've been teasing some of the planned paid plugins on the website for a while, and I've had a few inquiries showing interest. Then, a couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a guy who is re-building his online shop with Vendure and is on a tight deadline. He needs this functionality now and he was prepared to pay, even if the plugins were not ready yet!
So I spent a few days polishing up what I have, adding some rudimentary documentation and some crude distribution infrastructure, and I have my first ever sale!
I haven't even figured out the specifics of how licensing should work (per developer? per project?) or any pricing. So we just figured out an ad-hoc agreement we are both happy with - $1500 for an annual license for 3 of the plugins. Most likely this is cheaper than the final pricing, but since it's gonna be beta quality at first, and the feedback will be valuable, I think it's a good deal all round.
This is a big milestone and a validation of my business plan. Now I just need a couple of hundred more of these...
Congrats, the platform looks awesome. As a designer, I love the header's animation! 👏🏻
Thank you! My hobby is digital art & generative visuals so I was happy to spend a bit of time making something special for the header :)
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Nice, congrats Michael!
I've loved watching you working on Vendure since the beginning. You are a brilliant guy and it's been really neat to see you build something awesome all while figuring the best model for making a living.
I think you quit your job at the same time you started Vendure, about 4 years ago. Have you just done consulting on the side in the meantime for living expenses?
Great point! 4 years is super long without cash flow :)
Happy it worked out for you Michael!
Now work on the copywriting/messaging/marketing and let's get these clients 🚀🤝
Thanks Jordan! I've done a bit of consulting in that time, yes, but it's not enough to live off. To be honest I don't want to get too much into consulting because it doesn't scale and takes my time away from developing the platform. So I set a pretty high hourly rate and every so often a company is willing to pay for a few hours.
Mainly my time has been funded by my existing family business, for which I started developing Vendure in the first place (an online art supplies retailer). That's how I had so much time to develop this on my own terms with full focus.
Ah, okay. I feel better now. I've been worried!
Nice to be developing a product for yourself so you can expose a lot of the problem points with your own use.
It always baffles me how anyone can make any serious money with open source, always seems like a gamble
The vast majority don't. The reason is that most don't have any business plan - they don't sell anything. Sponsorship can help but very rarely suffice. For example, I make $300/m from sponsors.
Congratulations Michael, your framework looks promising. I will give it a try.
Thank you! Happy to hear any feedback you have.
Congrats Michael! It's a tuff process, but It's worth it !
Congrats man!
Beautiful. Hey, maybe it's a good thing that guy pushed you to put a price and start monetizing. Don't stop, seriously focus on monetizing. First, take $200 from that money, and treat yourself to something nice (take more if you can afford it). Then spend the rest on a sales/marketing strategy and get going. I cannot imagine the discipline it requires to keep going at it for 4 years. I'm super interested in learning more about how you went on for these years without monetizing. What kept you going.
You're right - I could procrastinate forever on figuring out the optimal pricing and licensing model (I mean, I will still do that anyway :D) but just being forced to come up with something to get started was indeed valuable.
So a bit of context how I could do this for 4 years - my family has an online retail business and I've been maintaining the website for the past 15+ years. Vendure was started in part as a solution to build out next iteration of our online store. So that business helps financing the development of the project.
This is a great arrangement both ways, since I get the time to focus deeply on building something great, I am at the same time using Vendure as a developer, implementing our new website with it (dogfooding), and the company now has an amazing new website built on cutting-edge tech.
Just incredible Michael. Congratulations, well done, and good luck mate!
That's amazing Michael, well done!
For inspiration you should look at what Taylor Otwell has done with Laravel. He has built tools around his open source PHP framework and appears to be doing very well. It is likely something that could be done with Vendure too.
Yes, Taylor is indeed an inspiration. Likewise Adam Wathan of Tailwindcss. It's notable that both Laravel & Tailwind are known for making it fun and productive to develop with. That's also a prime goal of Vendure.
Congrats Michael! 🥳
It's awesome that your hard work pays off and I'm 100% sure you'll be able to make a decent living from Vendure 🙌
Thanks for the support! Yes, this is certainly an encouraging start :)
Awesome! Congrats 🍾
Thank you Rik! I'm a big fan of your work too 🙌
Great idea, the platform looks awesome. Congrats!
Thank you!
All the best.
Congratulations Michael! Thats the best validation for your idea.. We are also looking for early users and feedback for our product (in early alpha) at https://vadelabs.com/
Thank you! Good luck with your product too!
Congrats Michael! I've always wondered how open-source projects avoid people simply ripping their code. Did you experience this while you were developing? I know it'd be on the back of my mind if I were in your shoes.
It's just something you need to be comfortable with. But the code as it exists now is only part of it. Let's say someone forks my code and starts a competing project. OK - are they confident they can keep up development to stay competitive with me? How are they going to build a community? How are they going to build reputation and trust? There are a lot of non-code factors that add up to a successful project.