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Comment by pinky07 | Hacker News Reader

Two years ago, it used to be our business model: selling maintenance services to bigger companies (includes unlimited technical support for bugfixes and upgrades). We tried hard to grow on services rather than selling proprietary features. (I don't think another open source software vendor succeeded to push a business model relying on services that far)

We grew up to 300 employees with this model but reached the limit of the model. (most companies don't want to pay for bugfixes and prefer to buy upgrades later) Now, we rely on 3 different offers: https://odoo.com/pricing

Since we switched to the new open core model, everything is simpler. Revenues grew a lot (monthly MRR growth is 242% higher than before) and we can invest more in the development of the open source product. Relationship with partners is easier too.

Disclaimer: I am the founder/CEO of Odoo.

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Hey, sorry if this is slightly off topic, but "developpers" is spelled wrong in the community column. Thanks!

> We grew up to 300 employees with this model but reached the limit of the model

Why do you need to grow more? 300 sounds like a very big company already.

Mostly, because we are too small for what we do: https://www.odoo.com/page/all-apps

Our promise is to cover all enterprise needs in a single software, while being super easy to use. It's something nobody succeeded for now on. On the market, you have two types of players: ERP (SAP, Oracle, MS. Dynamics) who deliver a huge business benefit but a poor usability (expensive and inefficient) and one-app vendors (trello, slack, mailchimp) who have a great usability but a low business value. The first category has a huge revenue per customer, and the second category can attract a lot of customers.

We think we can crack that, and offer the best of the two worlds: all business needs, fully integrated, with a top notch usability. We are in a very good position to do it, and be the first to do it. [1] (and every competitors try to do that but they are far from succeeding)

To succeed, we need serious investments in the product and the service offer. We don't need to be very big (e.g. 10.000 people), but 300 is too small for what we do.

tl;dr we want to fix a huge problem and to do it, we need resources.

[1] https://odoocdn.com/openerp_website/static/src/img/2016/home...

Quite the marketing pitch. I'm sorry that you had to sell some proprietary software to do it.

Just wanted to add, I think it is regretful that it was not possible for Odoo to grow a business on free software. I hope to be able to best Odoo at this some day, in a different domain.

At the same time, I am unapologetic for classifying pinky07's language as marketing. Evidence of marketing-speak is in "open source" instead of "free software", "open core" instead of "proprietary extensions" and other things such as "top notch usability", "best of both worlds".

Getting Odoo into Linux distributions would help users to be able to install it easily and trust it.

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