<story><title>Selling open-source software</title><url>https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-selling-open-source-software/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JohnMakin</author><text>A few problems with your comment -&lt;p&gt;1. 10% of your time doing devops work isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily a waste - if 10% of that time is cheaper than enterprise offerings, then this is probably worth the resources, unless you are very short on talent.&lt;p&gt;2. You have an assumption laden in this comment that SaaS products eliminate the need for spending time on &amp;quot;devops work.&amp;quot; It can greatly reduce that time, but IME even administrating a SaaS product can come with a ton work - look at EKS, a &amp;quot;managed&amp;quot; kubernetes cluster, but often requires a lot of kubernetes know-how to properly configure and maintain.</text></item><item><author>omeze</author><text>The truth is that people who are fine operating and managing their own ElasticSearch&amp;#x2F;Postgres&amp;#x2F;Spark whatever cluster are not the people who will be buying the SaaS offering. Theres no point trying to convert those people, theyll convert themselves once they get tired of constantly upgrading and maintaining a non-differentiated piece of their business, or they’ll just be happy users who bring your tech stack to their next gig, where the buy vs self-host choice gets revisited.&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that many teams think they’re “that guy (or girl)” who can manage a complicated piece of infra as a small team and will be saving money. If you spend 10% of your time doing devops work, you spend 10% less time on your actual product (you might as well be binging netflix). A majority of these teams convert (IME) to a hosted offering once the right price and SLAs and DevExp are there. The only part of your sales pitch that matters to these teams is “this isnt worth your time to self host when we have a great offering thats cheaper and faster to get setup”. If you have a logo from a big co that has the talent to self host but are buying your product, then your work is done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ncrmro</author><text>3. Managed solutions usually aren’t as configurable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Selling open-source software</title><url>https://thenewstack.io/entrepreneurship-for-engineers-selling-open-source-software/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>JohnMakin</author><text>A few problems with your comment -&lt;p&gt;1. 10% of your time doing devops work isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily a waste - if 10% of that time is cheaper than enterprise offerings, then this is probably worth the resources, unless you are very short on talent.&lt;p&gt;2. You have an assumption laden in this comment that SaaS products eliminate the need for spending time on &amp;quot;devops work.&amp;quot; It can greatly reduce that time, but IME even administrating a SaaS product can come with a ton work - look at EKS, a &amp;quot;managed&amp;quot; kubernetes cluster, but often requires a lot of kubernetes know-how to properly configure and maintain.</text></item><item><author>omeze</author><text>The truth is that people who are fine operating and managing their own ElasticSearch&amp;#x2F;Postgres&amp;#x2F;Spark whatever cluster are not the people who will be buying the SaaS offering. Theres no point trying to convert those people, theyll convert themselves once they get tired of constantly upgrading and maintaining a non-differentiated piece of their business, or they’ll just be happy users who bring your tech stack to their next gig, where the buy vs self-host choice gets revisited.&lt;p&gt;The main problem is that many teams think they’re “that guy (or girl)” who can manage a complicated piece of infra as a small team and will be saving money. If you spend 10% of your time doing devops work, you spend 10% less time on your actual product (you might as well be binging netflix). A majority of these teams convert (IME) to a hosted offering once the right price and SLAs and DevExp are there. The only part of your sales pitch that matters to these teams is “this isnt worth your time to self host when we have a great offering thats cheaper and faster to get setup”. If you have a logo from a big co that has the talent to self host but are buying your product, then your work is done.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>omeze</author><text>Both your counterpoints are true, I didnt want to sprinkle the word “marginal cost” everywhere (marginal devops cost of buy vs self host). And ofc I agree, not all saas offerings are the same, EKS is fairly meh as far as setup and time savings.</text></comment>