NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael B Allen]

On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Kristina Anderson
<ka at kacomputerconsulting.com> wrote:
> Greetings, all!
>
> For a while now I've been tossing an idea around in my head -- building
> and maintaining a saleable open source product rather than doing hourly
> consulting.  Specifically, a product in the CRM / marketing software
> space, which I feel is under-served.
>
> Does anyone have any experience with hooking up with business side people
> to refine ideas, get their input, and obtain funding/business partners?

Hi Kristina,

I can't think of any open source product that is profitable by itself.
The value in such a product is almost always really from the knowledge
and support of the people selling it.

My recommendation would be to double down on whatever you're doing.
Become the absolute uncontested expert in that CRM / marketing
software you're talking about so that you're the go-to person when it
comes to that package. Buy a cheap PC with 8GB of memory and run
VMWare with 5 VMs running various combinations on Windows, Linux,
different Windows OSs with different browsers, etc. Meaning create a
test network and try various permutations of the package in parallel.
Create test scripts to test the stability of the application. Help
people in forums (with a link to your website in your signature). Pick
something specific like how to make your iPhone work really well with
it and then blog about it. Etc.

I think a lot of developers (and entire software companies for that
matter) make the mistake of doing a wide variety of things in a
shallow way when they should really focus on a few things intently.

Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
Java Active Directory Integration
http://www.ioplex.com/