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12.15.2004 The business model of our company  People are beginning to get curious on the business model for our little company behind the umbraco software. How are we making a living and are we here tomorrow when we don't get paid for licensing our software? A little bit of history first? (skip the bullocks and go strait to the master plan here) Well, until recently it has been easy. Umbraco has been a one-man company doing implementations of umbraco, and along the way customized umbraco to their specific needs. The umbraco software wasn't public available and the business went pretty well. Then the business went from pretty well to really well and as a natural cause of effect, the pressure on the one man (that will be me) at the one man company rose. The plan with umbraco from the very start back in the middle of 2000 was to make great software available to everybody. The open source models fitted this plan very well, so by the middle of 2003 thoughts were made on how to make umbraco open source and at the same time still have an income to pay the bills. In the beginning of 2004 I started talking to Hans Henrik Højberg Heming (yup - an awful lot of h's there) on how to make this happen. Not that he knew much about open source, but he knew quite a lot about running a business. He also knew a lot about changing nappies as we both became fathers in the end of 2003. So it was pretty natural to discuss stuff like this while admiring our sons. The chemistry between us was really great so we started talking more and more, and while I knew a lot about developing software and making users happy, Hans Henrik kept talking about scalability. At the same time the pressure was growing and growing, and I wasn't really good at managing this. After all - I just wanted to building great software. I needed a model to help me do that and I might also need people around me to make it real. The umbraco business model of today So I asked Hans Henrik if he thought that umbraco could be an interesting place to spend more of his time, and the answer was positive. And so we began investigating in what we wanted and what people wanted. We talked to users, agencies, consultants and our families too - because not only did we want to build a company that developed great software, we would also like to spend a lot of time with our sons and wonderful wives. During the spring and the summer we made a lot of different models, some survived our filter but not many survived the feedback from agencies and consultants. And those who did had a scalability issue or were more focused on helping people use the software than building it! The solution During the fall we began seeing the light and we've been spending months lately shaping it and closing down the one man business implementing umbraco solutions. We knew that we had two huge issues we wanted to solve: Developing great software and teach other people how to use it the best way. Now when we give our software away, we needed some other income to finance the huge amount of hours we spend on it. But we would also like that whatever we spend our time on helps umbraco gets better. So I'm really excited on telling what we hope to do in 2005 and the years to follow. Introducing the "umbraco developer lounge" The umbraco developer lounge is a site available on a subscription basis filled with documentation, downloads and tutorials all relating to umbraco and is a capture of the best knowledge I've gained during the last years of doing umbraco implementations. So it should be a toolbox (or maybe even a treasure box!) for anybody professionally working with umbraco. And by subscripting to the lounge you're also financing the contenious development of umbraco. And it's pretty easy to sell to the managers in an organization. This isn't some strange donation model - you pay something and you get some really usefull in return. If I were wearing a tie, I guess I'd call this a win-win ;-) Now the idea is too keep writing tutorials and keep making tools and publish them at the lounge. But instead of spending 90 percent of the time doing implementations and 10 percent actually creating umbraco, the master plan is spending 30 percent on the lounge and the rest on making umbraco an even better product. I really hope this model will work, and I just can't wait getting started. We've made a small page with marketing bullocks and info on the lounge. More info will come later, but sign up for info at the page and we'll send you a really nice discount on the first year of subscription. 0 Comment(s)...
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