The difficulties we face to monetize our open source project

I&#x27;m curious whether the business model is truly the problem. While I&#x27;m sure LocomotiveCMS is a nice product, it&#x27;s operating in a very crowded space with numerous and established open-source, proprietary, and hosted solutions. From the way it&#x27;s described on your website, it doesn&#x27;t seem particularly specialized and thus highly valuable to a niche of the marketplace.<p>I wonder what would happen if a) you focused v3 on having features that specifically made it awesome for dentists with HIPPA compliance issues. Or cross-eyed investment bankers. Or someone with deep pockets and an unusual, unmet need and b) shifted the value of open-source from shared development costs to risk-avoidance. Namely: customers have an escape hatch if you cease development because they can update the source, export data into novel data formats, etc.

I read this with interest as I&#x27;m a founder of another CMS - <a href="http://grabaperch.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;grabaperch.com</a> - that I guess is a competitor (although we&#x27;re PHP &amp; MySQL).<p>We launched in 2009, and have always been licensed on a commercial basis. This means that we&#x27;ve been able to bundle top notch support in with license fees, and continue to develop the product based on user feedback. I really love the idea of things being open source and there are definite benefits of being so, but in reality it is very hard to make that model pay.<p>Instead we&#x27;ve gone for the paid license route, meaning that we could - when we were also doing client work - ensure that Perch was a &quot;first class citizen&quot; and not abandoned for stretches while we chased client projects. As the customer base grew, we could dedicate more time to it.<p>It&#x27;s still a tough business to be in, but we&#x27;ve carved out a bit of a niche in it. We aim squarely at small design agencies and freelancers who are rapidly building smallish sites for clients. They buy multiple licenses per month and know that we&#x27;re around to support them and also that we listen and consider features that they need.

&quot;Our only monetization strategy so far has been LocomotiveHosting. We had big hopes for it, but it has gained little traction and too little interest from our users.&quot;<p><a href="http://suckysales.locomotivehosting.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;suckysales.locomotivehosting.com</a>

Estelle from LocomotiveCMS here. Thanks everyone for the comments! We&#x27;re in full agreement agreement that we need to improve our marketing, many thanks for the suggestions.<p>You&#x27;ll see huge changes on our sites very soon. We actually paused all our marketing efforts for a while to focus on development but it seems that it has to be our priority #1 right now.

I am the founder of another open source project (<a href="https://erpnext.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;erpnext.com</a>) and we monetize from the end-user (non-developer community). This is the community which values hosting services else they would need a third party to host your product. If you identify that group, they are more likely to trust your service rather than go with someone else.<p>If you have a product that is targeted squarely on the developer community, it is hard to monetize unless you are a platform (i.e. GitHub). On similar lines, Wordpress makes money from bloggers, not web designers, hence the &quot;hosting&quot; service is value for money.<p>Do you target end customers for LocomotiveCMS? Look at your hosting customers and see why they signed up for your hosting. Identify a niche and focus on marketing to that niche.<p>Blog posts like this will definitely help. Wish you all the best!

If there&#x27;s truly a need and the product is a 10x improvement on the competition (even for a small niche), you shouldn&#x27;t need to pay people to work on an open source project like this. There are plenty of niches, and the main one I can think of is focusing on a super lightweight drop in CMS for existing Rails apps. Perhaps it generates static files into the `public` directory.

Here&#x27;s a marketing tip, your comparison page only compares to WordPress. &quot;Better WordPress&quot; doesn&#x27;t impress me. Try comparing yourself to a better product. One that people are currently paying money for.

Holy Contrast Rebellion, Batman! <a href="http://www.contrastrebellion.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.contrastrebellion.com&#x2F;</a><p>LC;DR - Low contrast, didn&#x27;t read.

Considering why this happens, perhaps the issue is... paid support on a small personal project feels like cheating, even if it saves you tons of time and reduces headaches. I guess people take pride in knowing their software stack from top to bottom. For larger projects egos are put aside because the more important factor is reliability.<p>I don&#x27;t have any answers of how to change things for your project, but hopefully this comment can be of some use.

In the Joomla world, at least, there are a lot of companies who seem to be making money off of open source plugins. One common model is to allow downloads only after you&#x27;ve subscribed. (Yes, the plugins are typically GPL.)<p>These usually come with automatic updates for a year for subscribers.<p>Sometimes this can be bundled with &quot;priority support&quot; for 3x the price.<p>And, of course, there&#x27;s always the classic &quot;upgrade to the pro version&quot; pitch

They really need basic marketing, for example, they aren&#x27;t mentioned on the wikipedia list of CMS...

I have worked for a company that did &#x2F; does a lot of money by providing a closed-source CMS for mainly Rails apps to its clients.<p>I must say that getting paying customers for any CMS is a lot of work.<p>If you are going for larger companies, you need to have an entire sales department that is going to try selling your product together with customized solution.<p>Actually, what worked best for that company was selling a licensed CMS + consulting and building really customized solutions.<p>Maybe your business could work out this way too, but with an open-source model at the core. You could extend the open source version with some enterprisy features, charge for it and offer support and consultancy in order to build truly customized solutions.<p>Still, the really tricky part, is selling the product in a market that is pretty crowded by now.

If I were a Ruby guy, I might have contributed code by now. I frequently look at popular PHP frameworks on Github to see if I can improve them. Sorry to hear nobody&#x27;s volunteering any contributions to your Ruby project.

One recommendation for you: I wanted to try out this CMS after reading the blog post, so I click on the &quot;Get Started&quot; link on your website... it requires me to subscribe to an email list?! Huge stumbling block there. There are SO many CMS&#x27;s out there, and if I can&#x27;t get a feel for it within a few minutes I&#x27;m going to just move on to the next one.<p>As a developer, I&#x27;m looking for easy-to-find docs. Having it in a downloadable PDF is already not so great... having to register for it is terrible.

I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. My start-up (also roughly a CMS) is considering going open source to increase awareness and the size of our target market. We were also considering continuing to make money via a hosted solution, although their revenue numbers don&#x27;t get me too excited about the prospect.

Don&#x27;t think &quot;code &amp; features&quot;, think &quot;product&quot;. We developers often miss the product side of what we do, yet it&#x27;s often the gut feeling that makes people follow certain trends while ignoring others. Any solid logic can be defeated by instincts (yes, we too can behave like our girlfriends). A more compelling product is better at sales that a more clever one. Yes, it&#x27;s more often irrational than not.<p>From the presentation standpoint, your website likes identity. It&#x27;s bland and super easy to forget. It just doesn&#x27;t grab me. Product needs to imprint itself at the unconscious level, it gotta be likable. Use your creative vision or ask for help.

While unrelated to the content, I find it it really hard to read when so much text is in bold. It&#x27;s hard to focus on the sentence I am reading at the moment as my eyes are unconsciously jumping to the emphasised bits. I guess it shows how powerful bold font might be, and at the same time how negative it can be when abused. I think bold text is great in short paragraphs (e.g. on landing pages) but probably not on a text as long as this.

Doesn&#x27;t Locomotive help you acquire new clients?