SXSW: Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free
Looking at Open Atrium in the light of open source business models
This afternoon I am speaking on the SXSW panel Selling Your Milk When the Cow is Free about what it has been like to make the transition to selling products with Open Atrium.
We only have one way to sell milk right now, and it ain't scaling, but we have plans :)
On the panel, I'll talk about the bootstrapping process we undertook when Open Atrium first launched last July. I'll share how we communicated about the work we wanted to be doing in a way that let us book a set of clients that had similar needs, which allowed us to pool resources to build a good foundation for Open Atrium.
This was a great way to start this work, but now we're facing the question "how the hell are we going to support this?" Last week Open Atrium passed 90,000 downloads. At this stage it's no longer something that we can keep supporting only through high end customization work. This leaves us with the other two prominent open source business models - support and/or SaaS. For the first time publicly, I'll share what we are planning and talk about the obstacles for us in making the transition to a new business model, from obtaining start up capital to fostering team growth and our culture.
The facilitator, Jeff Eaton, organized this talk to "educate others about OSS opportunities and pitfalls", so the Open Atrium angle is only a small part of a much larger and diverse conversation. The panel also includes:
- Evan Prodromou, the founder Status.net, an open source microblogging service.
- Tiffany Farriss from Palantir.net, a digital design and web shop that does a lot of work with Drupal.
- Brad Fitzpatrick, who worked for LiveJournal and is now at Google working on standards like OpenID.
The panel is at 3:30 pm in the Hilton A/B room.
Sidenote: I have only been to Austin once before and it was a really quick stop, so I would love to get some good bbq while I'm here. If you have any recommendations, please hit me up on twitter @ericg.
Commerical support would boost adoption
We installed and evaluated OA as an enterprise intranet & collaboration tool, but shelved it due to product immaturity and a lack of enterprise-class support. IMO, building a serious business around support and development of OA is the only way to see it flourish in serious enterprises of any size. Sharepoint is on track to completely dominate that space within a few years, and viable alternatives are sorely needed.
Exactly
Exactly. While the product is certainly growing up fast, product maturity will continue to be one of the biggest barriers to adoptions because it is developing so fast. Our commercial support is absolutely going to focus on upgrade support to make sure we can help guide everything thought the beta phase, in addition to other core atrium issues, theming, installation, configuration, bugs, features etc. Right now we are looking at two tiers for commercial support, depending on number of tickets needed and response turnaround. We feel we will nicely cover both enterprises in additional to having a price point that is within reach of smaller orgs. I hope to post more specifics in April on this.
I'ld to see I video also
I feel a bit too isolated from what the meat is cooking here in Barcelona. I hope there will be a video of this talk.
no video recording :(
Robert and Bevan, Sorry, there was no video recording our talk. I posted some more details about what we are seeing from a partners program here http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/mar/13/ideas-open-atrium-partners-p..., but that really does not capture the exciting conversation we had yesterday about open source business modules and struggles. I hope we can talk more about this over beers at DrupalCon SF.
startup capital?
You didn’t say where you’re getting it, so I hope the answer is “our own revenues,” but if not I’ll be really interested to hear where it’s coming from and hopeful that it’s good folks.
My experiences at VC backed organizations are not awesome, though of course there are plenty of successful VC backed projects/companies.
no VC
Hey Greggles, Yeah, this is all bootstrapped and continues to be be funded though revenues. It has been really rewarding working in such an organic environment, resource constrains certainly help us set priorities :p. We have no plans for VC, but like I said, the current scale of operations certainly requires more than we can do on the margins of customization projects. Commercial support is going to open up some exciting new revenues for us to keep burning hot. Also, this is now much bigger than Development Seed, thus why we want to build up capacity thought a Partners Program.
Video? DrupalCon?
I would love to attend or see this session, but am not at SXSW. Please share the video on Planet Drupal (if there is one) and/or repeat it at DrupalCon SF if possible.
I gotta say
That’s a whole lot of my favorite tech people on a single panel. Sorry to miss it but hugs to all of ya :-)
beers soon
James, You were missed last night!
Why not repeat it at Drupalcon?
I wish I could be there for the session: Open Atrium is brilliant, and I’d love to hear how you’re fitting professional services around it.
I didn’t see it on Drupalcon’s list of proposed sessions? Why not propose it? I’ll vote for it. :)
over beers?
Tom, I would be happy to talk about this over beers if people want to get together out in SF in April. I know Jeff Eaton and Tiffany Farriss could be persuaded :).