Bootstrapping can be key to software development
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Here's how Art Reisman, CEO, CTO and co-founder of APconnections Inc. explains his company's first product NetEqualizer:
At APconnections, our flagship product, NetEqualizer, is a traffic management and WAN optimization tool. Rather than using compression and caching techniques, NetEqualizer analyzes connections and then doles out bandwidth to them based on preset rules. We look at every connection on the network and compare it to the overall trunk size to determine how to eliminate congestion on the links. NetEqualizer also prevents peer-to-peer traffic from slowing down higher-priority application traffic without shutting down those connections.
Kind of hard to reduce into a palatable sales pitch, huh?
But with no financial backing and the need to improvise, the company found the key to their bootstrap approach.
• Open source application. With beta users free to try their product, the company soon found loyal users who helped them work out the bugs and provide great testimonial to pay customers.
• Sales direct and over the Internet. "If you make it they will come." With plenty of time and little money, the company found this was the perfect approach and required no big investment to prime sales channels
Reisman said not even theft by a bigger company frightened his firm in their open source experiments:
Afraid of copycats? In many cases, nothing could be better than to have a large player copy you. Big players value time to market. If one player clones your work, another may acquire your company to catch up in the market.
Join us for the next installment from the Kauffman Foundation bootstrap series next post…
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April 2nd, 2007 at 7:24 am
Sort of right, but also sort of wrong. I run a boot strapping software company focused on services software. We are in the final phase of development and can soon consolidate all those “other” bit and bobs that we run to keep the money flowing.
Boot strapping is by far the way to go and open source is also a very good rute. OS software gives you the chance to get others developers to work and review your product and means that there is a fairly high rate of early adoption and word of mouth promotion.
By giving away our core componants (like the Orbit42 base class) we give the impression of being a big player.
Potentail clients may wish to research our claims and find our product is in use in many places. They also see the sub brands (like Orbit42) and assume enough to close the sale. After that the quality justifies the assumption. (I’m real hot on quality).
At no stage do I wish to see imitators and thankfully OS development has the safegaurds I need. You see to imtate a company must throw piles of cash into finding another way to do what we do already. If they want something they can patent they have to work even harder so as to not get the OS community opening “war chest” accounts to go after them with lawers and suits and very very bad publicity.
The other option if they wishto imitate is to use our product parts and thus be open source (so we get to use their work too). This increases the market size and adoption rate but leaves us as the “inventors” and thus always part of the story (and market).
If big business want a closed source version they will have to buy it under license or purchase the copy right (buy us out).
http://code.orbit42.com is where the orbit42 base class can be found.
April 9th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
open source application is always a bit difficult to sell, why pay when you can get it for free? support is the key.
May 14th, 2007 at 4:48 am
I’m all in for open source and free software but some mouths need to be fed and development needs to be encouraged. People should really find the balance in my opinion.