[gavinhoward]

I've been following Rui's journey with curiosity because I am also trying to build a FOSS business.

Unfortunately, it's also around developer tools.

My value proposition is going to be support through real-time chat to employees of my clients. I want to cut out the middle man of a client employee being a de facto expert in my software and make myself the expert that employees can talk to.

In general, could this be a better value prop than Rui's?

Sorry if asking is inappropriate; you just seemed like someone who would know.

[bastijn]

Unfortunately, your time doesn't scale. Selling your own hours whilst also having to build and maintain a product and/or company is not a great idea. Hiring people to answer the questions is expensive as well. Things that get you a good chunk of money are based on being able to scale ridiculously well. Make once, sell many kind of things. People are not a good product to sell.

In addition, big corp knows the cost of an FTE and they will be translating your support offering back to FTE/hours, a unit they can put a price on. In turn, procurement will make your contract negotiation a living hell.

Better build and sell something they know they need but can only translate to how much value it will bring them / how much costs it will save at the bottom. Negotiating percentage(points) of a large sum of money is easier to sell than cash numbers that they translate to a human being being available to them.

Of course, if you really expect zero support is required and you can get many to sign it can still work out. It doesn't sound like a get rich quick scheme though.

[gavinhoward]

Thank you for your answer!

I don't need to get rich; a living is good enough.

However, your other points give me pause. While I do expect that over time, I will need to give zero support (after initially educating users, like [1]), that may also work against me since they'll now have the in-house "experts" I'm supposed to replace.

And if they are really that tight-fisted...

Maybe this is a bad bet.

[TAForObvReasons]

The author of Zod had an insightful comment on FOSS and monetization https://twitter.com/colinhacks/status/1422222156340072456

> whether an OSS project lends itself to monetization is a really interesting and subtle question. rule of thumb, be at least two of these: big, boring (roughly correlates with "infrastructural" as @patio11 puts it), and lacking obvious substitutes

The monetization strategy is only a part of the viability story.

[gavinhoward]

That rings true to me.

Unfortunately, my software is only one of the three things: boring. Sure, it can become big over time, and my plan was to make it big by getting my software in the hands of developers first, but that will take time I probably don't have.

Thank you.