Starting open source product or SaaS business
As a software engineer, I built few internal tools for internal usage at my company. Then it comes out my mind: should I open source it or start to ship as SaaS product?
It's commonly known that some successful SaaS product begin from open source project (think of hasura, mattermost, etc). However, for aspiring solo founder like me, it requires double effort to maintain public repo and rebuild it into SaaS product since it runs quite differently.
Any thoughts?
If you find that other companies are looking for the same type of product you should build a saas model from the start. With a price upfront.
Then you could find a growth marketeer that helps you get traction and initial sales. Or you can engage with the same type of audience like yourself (work groups) to try to find leads to test your assumptions.
You can do both too. There are a few Saas companies that use the OS model to give a brutal transparency to users as to what it can and cannot do.
rudderstack, servicebot to name a few.
keep in mind that going both also does require way more work in terms of documentation and code quality.
But then you also get much more qualified customers ;) that may even contribute to your feature set
I might only spare 4-6 hours/week for this project, and its complexity is medium. I think I'm going to open source it, while looking for SaaS possibility in the meantime.
Thanks!
SaaS is the future
Building a big open source project is a lot of work! I tried it (without validating first - bad idea), and it was so much more work and didn't help attract users.
Definitely not saying it won't work, there are plenty of successful examples, just that it can be hard with little pay off.
Alternatives might include releasing a free tool, or open source a small component of what you want to build to see if there's traction.
Good luck, whatever you decide to do :)
Thanks! You gave me idea about open sourcing some parts of it. I could split it into two major parts, which people could choose if they want to hack the tool, or going to the complete solution.
It really depends on the product. Can you do it on your own? If so, I would try to charge the customers as early as possible. Only then you'll be able learn if you are building something people want (not just a single company) to pay for.