Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

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> and pivoting to adding value with LLMs on top

lol, maybe you could go back in time and add some value with Blockchain or Big Data too!

Is your business profitable? Maybe a small sustainable business isn’t exciting to someone who is seeking a moonshot but it seems like you’re looking for recognition and business fame rather than actually solving customers’ problems.

In my opinion, open sourcing your product won’t magically make it more attractive to more people. It sounds like it already only fits a small niche and that’s probably fine.

If you want it to help more customers I would evaluate your product market fit as well as your marketing efforts first. Have you maxed out your addressable market or do you need more effective marketing, pricing, or something else? Is there enough business pain to justify the existence of your product?

Open source won’t really help you solve those things, it’s just a code license. In my opinion, customers of CRM/ERP products don’t really care about whether the code is open source, they care about whether the product solves their business pain, lowers costs/risks, increases productivity. E.g., if we open sourced AOL instant messenger that wouldn’t make it a more popular product than Discord.

I'm not interested in developing a product that's too slow to grow. And if it is, I guess there is no point in keeping the code closed. We are trying big moves and changes. Some of them will work. Will see. At least my integration partners really want my codebase open source :-)

My gut feeling first impression is that your integration partners probably want your code open source so that you give away all the value that you’ve worked to create.

They are looking at their best interests, not yours.

I’m thinking that you’re not looking at how to change the product to solve more customer pain and therefore grow, you’re just interested in dumping your work into open source, hoping it brings more attention to your company like a marketing campaign, and then you want to build a new fad product (AI, LLMs) in the hope that it will be your high risk high reward high growth moonshot.

Just be careful because LLMs aren’t well-suited to every single use case just like Blockchain and Big Data (which is why I brought up those fad technologies that used to make VCs salivate).

Yes, I understand. But we've created a value that's too slow to grow. It doesn't make sense.

if I were you I'd seek to sell it instead of open-source it. "pivoting to adding value with LLMs on top" is very expensive from a COGS standpoint; and will complicate your business economics, not simplify them.

You don't seem to have a problem where open-source is the answer; the problem you seem to have is you built a business and a business model you weren't intending to build; and you don't solve that by open-sourcing. You can solve that a myriad of ways, but none of them are readily solved by open-sourcing your product.

I agree, but I don't see any point in selling it. I'd instead post the code and use it in all my other businesses without depending on the buyer. Besides, there is still a market for Odoo and Zoho integrators, and I think we can try to gather some of these people around our product.

After having looked over your product's website (ozma.io), it feels like the issue may be more ensuring you're being seen by your target customer and solving a problem they have that entices them to use your product.

Your product's website is very 'feature' oriented, and not very 'Pain/Dream/Fix' formatted. https://sharpen.page/jtbd/copywriting/pain-dream-fix-and-jtb...

Interesting, thank you!

Going back to the original question of the thread, it’s starting to sound more like a grieving process than an answerable question. How do you open source the code? You flip it from private to public. That’s pretty much it. Well, okay, maybe an over-simplification.

If the business is small and profitable but it’s not growing how you’d like then I’d probably be more interested in selling it if it was me. I am not sure you will be able to sell it if the code is all open source.

> it's starting to sound more like a grieving process

Why? No grieving. Many products in the world are not growing as fast as their creators would like – it is OK. We just try new things and see what happens. Like what if you put all the code on the net :-)

I said grieving because it’s like you made something that is “dead” but you think you can save it via open source, when in reality it may just be “dead.” (Or not, I don’t know)

Though, I like what someone else brought up in another reply to you about pain/dream/fix. It’s very similar to what you learn in programs like Force Management training where they teach frameworks like MEDDPICC. Finding business pain, demonstrating negative consequences to build urgency, etc.

I don’t know if this is something you’ve already done or if the sales approach has been more like “if you build it they will come.”

i completely agree, having seen founders over and over again delude themselves into belief that a marketing push will get their product to some escape velocity

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