IBM shifts legacy commerce systems to my one-man bootstrapped project

For the past 3.5 years I've been working on an open-source e-commerce platform, Vendure.

It's in a niche known as "headless commerce" which is really hot right now, so I've had lots of interest from VCs over the past year. However, I'm determined to see how far I can take things as a bootstrapped indie-hacker.

Yesterday was a major milestone as I was able to announce that IBM have adopted Vendure to replace an outdated, proprietary system that had been slowing them down and causing huge expense in terms of license fees as well as lost developer productivity.

This is very exciting because my business plan hinges on "open core", which means that although the core framework is available for free, I will sell proprietary plugins covering more complex use-cases. To be viable, this plan depends on Vendure being adopted widely, and ideally by more mid-market to enterprise companies which have plenty of budget for what I am providing.

There's that old phrase, "nobody got fired for buying IBM". Well, I'm hoping that this will make it clear that my project is a safe choice, no matter the company size.

Thanks to the Indie Hackers community for the continued inspiration over the years. I'll keep you updated!