Month: January 2017

Enterprise SoftwareInfrastructureOpen Source

Developer love vs revenue Going from Seed to Series A

Posted on by Ed Sim

Great blog post by CockroachDB on open source business models and their plans to make money:

If you’re serious about building a company around open source software, you must walk a narrow path: introduce paid features too soon, and risk curtailing adoption. Introduce paid features too late, and risk encouraging economic free riders. Stray too far in either direction, and your efforts will ultimately continue only as unpaid open source contributions.

I would say same goes for any developer-focused company whether OSS or some other hybrid free/premium model. It is truly an art form when it comes to striking that steady balance between developer and community love versus generating revenue and potentially alienating those who supported you.

This is also an important question as it relates to fundraising for dev-focused startups. Introduce your pricing page too soon and that is the metric that Series A investors will track religiously. Bet the farm on developer love and metrics only and you may never get enough traction to get to that next round.

From what I have seen in our portfolio, goal #1 is always to build an amazing community, focus on developer love and track the metrics and tweak. Without the developers, you have no customers.

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Enterprise SoftwareSaaS

Thoughts on SaaS in 2017

Posted on by Ed Sim

When we started boldstart in 2010, a core thesis of ours was to invest in next-gen SaaS which we called SaaS 2.0 at the time and best highlighted in our end of 2015 review:

SaaS 2.0, reinventing for the mobile first workforce will continue to remain robust. We also see older school SaaS companies being rebuilt with more flexible back-end technologies like microservices and reimagined with a more responsive and beautiful UI.

While we continue to be excited about opportunities in SaaS startups, it is clear that the game has changed substantially since 2010. Despite the amazing productivity gains from open source, AWS, microservices and other new technologies, we have seen the time to launch extending and the cost of getting a minimally viable product (MVP) out the door increasing. So why is this the case?

  1. Most SaaS categories have multiple players and to build a transformative SaaS app means the bar to what a “minimally viable product” is much higher than it was 5 years ago. In other words, a MVP of 5–6 core features may now need 8–10 core. This takes more time, money, and resources. Founders need to make tough decisions on what their definition of feature parity is and what that one unique product angle will be to rise above the noise (more to come in a follow up post).
  2. The competition for talent has and continues to be fierce so as tech costs go down, human capital costs continue to increase.
  3. Cost of getting message to market has increased due to the noise from the many competitors in a particular space.

So what can a founder and investor do in this changing world?

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