| We have modelled our company/product specifically on JetBrains. We're also bootstrapped, self-funded, etc. We build a tool for Apache Kafka (https://kpow.io), it's not a SaaS product, it's a single docker container or JAR that runs in air-gapped environments, our users install it in their own network and it just runs. That's what we thought engineers wanted, and tbh it turns out we were right in plenty of cases. Our licensing is an annual subscription however - but then again so is JetBrains (well at least for the Intellij product that I happily pay ~$150 a year for). I think for us the recurring revenue is really important, we wouldn't be able to sell you a perpetual license as we have commercial costs that are ongoing and related to maintaining the quality of the product. Not only is it better for us commercially, but also we have only had one customer in the last three years request a perpetual license, and we we explained we don't offer that model they bought a subscription. So I completely agree on the non-SaaS JetBrains model, and I love that you mentioned that company. We often get asked about Confluent in our area of expertise but quite honestly from day 1 in 2018 we've been aiming to be the JetBrains of distributed systems. We even followed their dark branding style. Edit: Just to add one more bit of context now I think of it. Don't underestimate the power of the hive-mind. We have spent four years building a boostrapped non-SaaS product. We spend all our time talking to customers, shipping features, squashing bugs - living the dream basically. That's a really rare path to follow this decade. We've also had four years of often well-meaning people trying to intro us to low-information 'startup investors' or god-forbid another startup 'accelerator'. We stopped talking to all of them about two years ago, but for a while there we got told repeatedly to build a SaaS product. And the single worst piece of advice I've ever received which nearly made me puke, when we were in year one of our product and already had a reasonable number of users / clusters: "Just grab all their information and stick it in an S3 bucket, that information is what everyone wants! Number of clusters, users, version, etc - you can sell that!" Some people just don't understand that you can sell a tool that does something valuable without making your customer base some side product that you sell on the open market. It has been hard at times when we see startups raise tens of millions, but we're now in a position where we are miles out in front of the pack, have a rock-solid product, a great roadmap yet to go, and s stack of great customers who we respect. At no point would someone else's cash or terrible advice have left us in a better position - though we might have ended up with a SaaS product instead.. |