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How Would You Launch a Dual-Licensed Product?
tdbp asks: "My startup company has just released its first product, but since it is made up of geeks without a clue about marketing strategies, and we are looking for suggestions on how to launch a product with spam-free methods of searching for possible customers. The product is a dual-licensed development tool, so the main targets are C/C++programmers and system integrators. Our plan is to build a community of developers around the GPL version of our product, and to use this base of users to promote the product to people of higher rank with more decisional power, who could eventually buy a commercial license or support service. Do you think this is a reasonable business model? Do you have any suggestions on how to promote the tool or find companies interested in it?"
Crush your customers, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.
Some perspectives here.
/. article submitter on the off-cahnce).
My main advise would be, if you're thinking about starting a business either find a market and go for that, create a market (identify a (potential) need) or make something that could become hugely popular (sort of creating a market) like much Web 2.0 stuff. Have a lot of planning but don't let something hairbrained be eliminated if it makes a little sense, risk vs. reward, etc.
My my main advise is moot since you already have a product. I'm curious, did you do this for the passion (if so I give you kudos!), or what?
So... spread your product and its name (link to it on your Slashdot article submission)! Dual licencing seems to work for MySQL pretty well, but that's not the only reason it worked for them, as they entered the web-serving market early and secured a form of sticky monopoly. Bigger software houses are going for free (as in beer) distributions (MS Visual Studio/SQL Server, Oracle, and others).
Build up contacts - could you sell this project (not product) - if you released it in a GPL version could you sell out to another company (who may want it as part of their project suite) so easily?
But really, what advantages does your project offer? TFS mentioned nothing other than it was a 'development tool', and there are quite a few of them, and they cover quite a spectrum. Without posting some more specific info I have nothing more than build up your market knowledge of potential customers and target them specifically (this product can do X for you in Y situation or provide some more details - we're as much in the dark now as before you submitted the story(and if I were a potential cstomer, indeed I may work for a company who is, I'm hardly going to mail a
Good luck!
Or, better yet, find an individual who wants to come in as a partner (that is, assuming that this small business is owned by its workers). Scott Mcnealy comes to mind, as an example... I think he has outlasted all the others who started Sun.
Most common startup business plan:
I've always wanted to name a company "Phase 3 Software".
"This mission is too important to allow you to jeopardize it." -- HAL
is what you need with your plan. and that, unfortunately, means money. other than that, it's what i would do.
how to build a community? get people to use it, and promote it for you. get reviews written on sites likely to be linked by slashdot. if it solves real world problems (as opposed to imaginary problems), real world open source developers will likely use it. show them what problems it solves.
i, for one, would like to know what it does, but your blurb doesn't tell me that. what is it? yet another version control system? yet another debugger? yet another ide? or something as spectacularily useful as valgrind?
You've already missed a great promotional opportunity. You got posted to ask slashdot without a link to the product page. D'oh.
But dual licensing...I always wanted to see an amended GPL, with the added restriction that you MAY NOT port this code to Windows...because the company that gave you this free program does that, and they're charging Windows customers for it, which is how they finance development and keep the free tool for free systems free, if you follow me. Why not? Give away the free version for the free systems; charge the pay-ware users for your software, too!
I can think of a lot of flaming we could have gotten ourselves out of, if certain programs had never been ported to Windows at all.
You need marketing hotties
In addition, you could have posted your products web site with your story, but I guess hinesight is 20-20.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
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You are a bunch of geeks with good enough project management skills to get a product out.
Do you even know that the market needs your product? Where's your business plan? There is a lot of competition in the space you mentioned, will they be able to change 100 lines of code in their offerings and crush you?
You are in severe need of an MBA, but a good one will be expensive. Hopefully not as expensive as if the company failed, which it sounds like it will if you don't get an MBA (or someone with more of a clue about how sales and marketing work than the poster).
You posted to slashdot but without your product. If you had just posted the URL in the post, your product would already have got thousands if not millions product and marketing reviews. Sometimes, getting slashdotted might help ;-)
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
I did something a little more drastic than you're talking about I ended up open sourcing 99% of (what was ) my primary company. However we leaned heavily in the same direction you are.
.. like what if I have a security problem, what if I miss something and sell a solution and it fails.. and I get sued, etc.
.. and monetizing yourself from customizations. You still benefit from being paid to improve your product, you're not alienating developers who would shy away otherwise, and you increase youselves as an authority in your industry.
..
:)
I opened everything for a few reasons :
1 - There is too much commercial competition and the market for (everything) IT is saturated to the point where significant capital is required to enter it. You must be prepared to spend a million bucks on a sustained marketing blitz in order to gain any significant market share.
2 - The problem with media shares and reverse engineers.
3 - We took too long getting a product ready to sell.
4 - There are just too many other companies doing exactly what you're doing. Open / crippled pay / primo. We actually surveyed a few hundred programmers, and found they felt such arrangements were unfair. "Why should we make what they sell even better?".
5 - You need to market, AND have money in the bank for uh-oh's. This is tough for smaller companies (like me).
Then I factored in a bunch of what-ifs
I really recommend making it totally open, reducing it of course
You also are providing an as-is solution that you can warranty at your discretion if you tailor it. This is harder to do, but not impossible with programming toolboxes.
In summary, if your gonna do it, do it. $10k went into the research behind my decision to open my company completely. Its $10k worth of free advice. Take it or leave it.
And dumdum, put a link to your site in the submission next time. Actually, please go shoot yourself in the head with a squirt gun until it really really bruises for not doing so in the first place. Front and center, right on the forehead. Then tell everyone why you did it. Ugh
Seriously, hope my experience helps. I lost a good chunk of cash in this rat race, if someone can avoid doing the same then its money a (bit) better spent. If I had it to do all over again I would have opened it from the start, had a better product and more money left in the bank by now
at least tell us what the programs are FOR on your website! Your introduction states:
"...was formed aiming to create products of tangible quality for its Clients and together with them. The company makes use of its diverse yet highly qualified technical personnel and a well-structured development method, which can be adapted contextually."
It says NOTHING of this product you speak of! I noticed some of the names in your News page, but I still couldn't figure out what the programs themselves did!
It was easier to find out that you use extreme programming.
Finally found out through googling - on Freshmeat.net, of all places, that one of the products was a C++ web framework. The other two that are supposed to be released, I can't even google for more information!
Honestly, I'd suggest finding people who are willing to pay you for usign these products, and get your word of mouth out from the other side. However, while you're at it, at least put the code on your web page!
- If your program does the same things as an existing commercial application, then the Open Source Tinkerers looking for an alternative to hat they are already using will download the GPL version and play with it; and then they'll decide either to ditch it altogether or stick with the GPL version.
- If your program does something that nobody has ever done before, then most of the people who have managed without it for this long will be able to last a bit longer. The genuinely curious will just download the GPL version and stick with it if they think it's any good.
- You will also have a very hard job enforcing the law against "pirates" of your commercial version. If they are ever caught, they will just switch to the GPL version rather than pay for a commercial licence.
Your best strategy really would be to make your money by some other means than selling commercial licences. It's not the 1980s anymoreJe fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I would advise you to learn how to spell before you try to give advice.
So I went with PostgreSQL.
I'll do the same thing if I run across something similar to what you're doing that has a less expensive license on it. I suggest some competitive analysis before you try the dual-license thing, and also figure out how easy it would be for someone else to do replicate what you're doing, unless perhaps you patent it.
The market for development tools is not what it once was, but I think you've chosen a wise licensing strategy. I doubt I'd know about MySql and Qt if they weren't dual-licensed GPL products. Use the GPL side of things to build product awareness and get contributions, and use the proprietary licensing side to fund your company.
I think you should take a dual approach to marketing, too. Market it as a GPLed open source project: use the internet as a medium to to convice people that your tool is worth their time to investigate and use. Spread the word over the normal channels (mailing lists, newsgroups, blogs, forums, etc). If your tool attracts enough users, you'll get your own community going. Be sure to encourage that--having actual users will spread awareness of your tool and will help you tune it into an even better product.
Since this is also a commercial product, you'll probably need to work the more conventional marketing channels. I don't know what the best way to do that is. Paul Graham, founder of a successful internet startup, speaks highly of PR firms. That might worth looking in to when you reach that point.
Good luck!
It's not a company - it's a Dungeons and Dragons session without the game.
"How Would You Launch a Dual-Licensed Product?"
Don't. I buy software components from a company that dual-licenses their software. I simply love negotiating price with them: we are currently getting something like 80% off of list price because we have threatened to go the free route so many times. There are likely many more customers like me out there - my dual-source supplier is currently courting buyers, probably in the hopes that someone who knows what they are doing can bail them out. (If they do get bought out, I don't care - I also have their source code.)
My advice would be to release whatever you have as FREEWARE (but not give out the source), keep your day jobs and see if you can find a market or a talented individual who can find a market for you, and LISTEN to the valuable advice your users give you. Then, once you've figured out a market with an unmet need, figure out a way to sell your product as commercial software to fill that need for those customers. (Hint: services are key.) "SmartFTP" is an example of a company/product that successfully went this route.
My startup company has just released its first product, but since it is made up of geeks...
Your product is made of geeks? Is that legal? How are the geeks prepared? Fried, pureed?
"I'm not, like, that smart. I, like, forget stuff all the time." -- Paris Hilton
Based on the OP's email address and a little digging through a buzzword-infested website with a beautifully retina-burning design, I'm guessing that KLone is the product they're trying to sell.
My first bit of advice would be to re-work your website. It sounds like a big part of your target audience will be developers. Consider: Programmer Jon has been hacking away for hours. Finally, he throws up his arms in despair. All the Red Bull in the world can't seem to solve his problem, so he starts searching the web for a solution developer that may be able to help him. Right now, it's 1am. He's sitting in a dark or dim office, and he's using the LCD display his company provided. So far, this has not been a problem, though; he's been programming in a console editor or other program that allowed him to set background to black and foreground to gray or vice-versa, and his eyes are doing fine. So...he comes across your site, which offers the ideal solution to his problems. Does he dive under the desk in fear of the brightness of your site, or look deeper? Right now, I say he dives. But say he gets past that...does the main page dazzle him with brilliance, or baffle him with bullshit? I say it baffles...even after you sort through the buzzwords and convert the main page to English, there is still nothing telling a potential customer wtf you are selling.
It seems to me that the subject of this ask slashdot only scratches the surface of the depths of your incompetence in the world of marketing. That's not to say you're a bad developer...just a bad marketer. So, my simple answer to your question: Hire somebody who doesn't have to ask the questions you are asking, instead of trying to solve the problem yourself.
Unpleasantries.
you could start by telling us what produce it is. Given you have jsut submitted content to slashdot, i think yoiu deserve at least that much promotion.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
My startup company has just released its first product, but since it is made up of geeks without a clue about marketing strategies
Well, that's your problem right there: at this point, you need to add some non-geeks to your company. (In fact, it sounds like you're well past that point.)
Look, you don't expect the marketroids to be able to do a decent job of C++ coding... so why would you expect geeks to do a decent job of formulating marketing strategies?
Sure, there are folks who have skill in both areas, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Marketing is not as hard as one might think. Of course marketing should be started from day one... marketing is not merely advertising, it's goal is to understand your customer and ensure that you are providing what the market needs to solve their problems. Here are some suggestions to get you started:
Read some good books on the subject (Innovators Dilemma, Crossing the Chasm, Tales from the Tornado, ...)
Answer these questions on your website and in your literature:
What is you typical customer profile?
Why would they buy?
What pains does your product solve for them?
Who are your competitors?
What differentiates you from your competitors?
Prepare a press release that announces your company and your product (by answering the abovementioned questions). Work from examples that have been put out by other companies in the past. Then email a bunch of editors for publications & media in your domain about one to two weeks before the press release goes on the wire.
Best of luck to you!
I'd hire a couple of hot booth babes, preferably twins, print the text of each of the two licenses on a skimpy/flimsy outfit, and put the babes in them. One could be "open girl" and the other "support girl" or something like that. Make sure to use an 8pt font size so the outfits are a tiny as possible while still holding the full text.
No offense, but you're basically asking the Slashdot community to fill in the other half of your business plan...you know, the actual money making part. Getting expertise on how to do that costs money.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
here's the link to the product we mentioned: http://koanlogic.com/kl/cont/gb/html/klone.html
"Intellectual Property Protection - KLone's mechanism of compiling both static and dynamic web content into an executable object provides a means of distributing web applications without the corresponding source code." (http://koanlogic.com/kl/cont/gb/html/klone-featur es.html)
VS.
" Great victory against software patents in the European Parliament (648 votes against the reform, 14 in favour and 18 abstentions). Much of the merit goes to the many campaigns and efforts of supporters of the free software community." (http://koanlogic.com/kl/cont/gb/html/news.html)
I noticed that the contact email was "info (at) koanlogic.com". Real companies aren't afraid of spam (they can usually afford a mail server with a spam filter), nor do they want to make it any harder than necessary for people to contact them (by having to change the " (at) " to a "@".)
TrollTech's Qt library had a rough start in the dual-licensing arena, but they got things ironed out, and now they have vibrant commercial and GPL software groups. Go browse www.trolltech.com for ideas on how to approach things. Look for other companies doing this as well. If possible, treat your GPL users as first-class-citizens; they may convert to commercial users at their daytime job.
I have no idea what product you are selling, but the key to marketing is to figure out how your future customers get their information. Try to learn their culture and expectations. Posting relevant "[Ad] Cool Commercial/GPL Software Toolkit" articles to a few newsgroups or discussion boards is generally acceptable, while omitting the [Ad] in the subject line might offend some people. If there are GPL versions available, make sure all the major sites (e.g. freshmeat) have useful listings.
Good luck.
If you're dealing with an IDE that's not too expensive, works, and you're willing to have customer support for, then I would say that any CS department that teaches C or C++ is a worthy attempt.
Try casually mailing CS professors and ask them if they're happy with what they have.
I know for sure that if we were to use an IDE for C instead of emacs, it would make my life a hell of a lot easier instead of using Java and eclipse... Eclipse is nice, but Java drives me insane.
And when people who know your IDE come out of school and end up in places where they are able to make recommendations, well you've got yourself some sort of a market...
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Mentioned in the comments about Vista yesterday was this article on business models: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRu bberDuckies.html
The author implies that multiple licenses can insense your customers, provide discounts to the people who can afford pay you the most (corporations), and may ultimately fail because large corporations have purchasing divisions whose sole purpose is to get you to charge less. Worth a read, at least.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I always wanted to see an amended GPL, with the added restriction that you MAY NOT port this code to Windows
Find me a Linux driver for my paid-for Microtek 4850 flatbed scanner, which has for years been listed as unsupported in SANE, and I might agree. Until then, Cygwin still has its uses.
Give away the free version for the free systems; charge the pay-ware users for your software, too!
All operating systems are pay-ware because either you pay for the majority operating system or you pay to replace incompatible hardware.
Of course, if you make them do that, they'll be less likely to contribute at all.
And make sure they didn't borrow their mods from somewhere inappropriate. It'll be your product and company that is in trouble if they do.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
My advice is - Don't release your product under a dual license. It leads to all kinds of problems and the chance of commercial success is somewhat limited. I suggest that you consider one of the following options:
Option 1: Basic version under GPL with commercial extensions / plugins
- You release the basic framework and the base set of functionality under GPL.
- You release a set of closed-source extensions / plugins under a commercial license. Ofcourse, your existing system must have support for loading plugins at run time and some sort of plugin registration / installation option.
Option 2: The full version is released closed-source but is sold at a low price. Also include a free / limited evaluation version.
This option may, infact, be a better option. This allows people who want to test out your software to do that without spending money (evaluation version) and also keeps the entry-barrier (cost) low for others. Examples where this has succeeded: Enterprise Architect product from Sparx Systems. It is an excellent product but yet priced so low that it basically ate up its more feature-rich and well-entrenched but expensive competition.
I hope this helps.
I'm sorry, but changing the past is impossible in our universe.
Unless you've got sales in the making allready (large custom projects, vendor bundling your stuff, etc.) don't release as OSS. OSS only makes sense if you've got a clear vision on how to capitalize of that in your business. OSS can be a good marketing tool - but you've got to know what you are doing. Curiously enough, OSS makes best sense when you've got a product on your hands that would go as closed source aswell.
Get a handfull of clients that want your product + some customization and warm up to your target market. Then you can still GPL once you've got a feel for things. Marketing is key to success - OSS or not. OSS won't compensate for crappy marketing. Do your homework.
I GPLd a commercial product of mine - but that was after carefull consideration and after my partners and clients agreed to join the OSS game. Now we're all partners in bringing the product into mainstream with various other revenue models. And the initial projects payed my rent during maturing phase. I'd do it again - but only that way.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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