Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

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A business model isn't a unicorn. Your business model doesn't need to be unique or even different. To the contrary: just do what's known to work!

90% of software companies have the following business model:

    * create proprietary software
    * charge money for licences
    * charge extra for support
    * charge extra for updates
    * pay through the nose for enterprise options

90% of saas companies work like this:

    * create proprietary software
    * offer a free trial
    * charge money for it every month
    * (optional) pay through the nose for enterprise options

It's just that simple. No need to overthink it.

Having industry expertise just makes it easier to get to product-market fit. It's by no means a requirement. You may be undervaluing your industry experience. Unless your market knowledge is really generic (e.g. webshops), you've probably got some valuable insights.

(edit: most programmers get paid well, therefore, if you become a programmer you're likely to get paid well. If there are a lot of companies making money in a market, then you're likely to make a lot of money if you enter that market. Inversely, if everybody in a market is struggling [indie games] then you're likely to struggle too.)

In the case of the SaaS business models, is the first step even needed? I'm still trying to not be blinded by my idealism but is there really any value in making source proprietary if it's a SaaS business? Would GitHub's popularity be affected appreciably if it were closed? Google's?

I remain hopeful that the standard SaaS business model dovetails nicely with free and open source software.

Google's certainly would be. Microsoft has dumped millions into trying to get Bing to a point where it can even begin to compete with Google—if Google open sourced their code, tons of competitors would crop up trying to take market share.

GitHub would probably have less of a problem with open sourcing their code because their primary value prop isn't that they've built some brilliant software but that they take the bother out of managing your source hosting.

> GitHub would probably have less of a problem with open sourcing their code because their primary value prop isn't that they've built some brilliant software but that they take the bother out of managing your source hosting.

GitHub is making money by selling their proprietary pack to other corporations so they could implement it on their own server. If they release it for free, they wouldn't be able to support free code hosting services and remain profitable.

They're also selling premium plans for the regular users, but I don't think that this gives them enough profit to remain profitable.

The facts point squarely in one direction, as far as I can tell. Profitable SaaS companies are proprietary. Where are the billion dollar open source SaaS companies? I don't see them. Maybe the big companies occasionally release a component on github to get some goodwill, but nothing big.

It's only when you go all the way down to the "lifestyle" sized companies that I see real dedication to the open source ideals. They're willing to put their entire product on github. Props to those founders, but it's pretty insignificant because those businesses are so small.

Most people don't have the skills to run their own servers, and nor can we expect them to. Service based products are the future, but I hope that interoperability gets to the point where customers can switch painlessly between different providers. That would put a lot of leverage back in the hands of the end user. If I had to name one problem it would be lock-in, not proprietary code.

No, I maintain that for SaaS, that first step is not needed. There can be tremendous value in finding an OSS project and basing a SaaS business on it. The most important thing is still the value it offers to your customers.

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