How We Bootstrapped an Open-Source Project to $120k/Month
Hello! Tell us about yourself and what you’re working on.
My name is Daniel Hauschildt, and I’m the CTO at img.ly based in Bochum, Germany. Prior to my work at img.ly, I spent a good amount of time in academia studying computer science and finally graduated with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering.
These days, I am working on PhotoEditor SDK — a fully customizable photo editor that adds all kinds of photo editing capabilities into any app with minimal effort — with co-founder Eray Basar.
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Great interview guys! How much time did it take for you to build the first (open-source) version of the photo editor?
I joined IH yesterday. and This is the first interview that I read! Definitely love it. It 's very useful when you said you wish you had built less and focused on fewer.
Awesome! I really like this type of SaaS! but I am know nothing about code...So I only can choose content marketing, But nowadays, content marketing is really hard! We can give me some advice? BTW, I will list your PhotoEditor SDK on my this page, https://phreesite.com/free-photo-editor/ I just test it, really powerful and easy to use APP!
The Aviary/Adobe Photo Editor shutdown worked out really well for you :) I can see it on the charts. That was the time when we switched to your service as well.
The switch wasn't too easy, and the support was pretty slow... I assume you had a huge rush of clients those days and were not prepared for the increased scale.
Since then the service seems to be working without issues, so you did a great job in scaling things. Congrats!
Courtland, thanks for the interview!
But I have just one question. Why is the interview on IndieHackers?
Don't understand me wrong, I see everyone can get something useful from it but it's not about "Indie hacker" - the product was created by the digital agency, can we call them "indie hackers"?
I had an impression that interviews are usually taken from them, no?
Interesting question. Wether we can be called indie hackers or not is not important to me as long as the interview is useful to someone. But I will shed some light on how we all went down 4 years back.
Aside that, the faq at https://www.indiehackers.com/about states
Considering that, I would consider us indie hackers. Back then we worked for a small agency. We did not raise money from an investor, nor did the agency have the money to just pay a team to build the sdk back then. One person started building the sdk on the side, as we got traction and sold our first license, we used that money to extend the team before that we did not much todo that.
Sure, one can argue. In the end, it does not matter much. The interview is supposed to give others some insights into lessons we learned. If we are not per definition indie hackers, that's fine for me. At least I can tell that our mindset is.
Thanks for sharing your journey! I see that your SDK is open-source on GitHub. But on https://photoeditorsdk.com, you do not mention that it's open-source and you have a form to request for a license. Are you charging for every license? If yes, how does it work with your source being open on GitHub?
Later, due to several reasons we had to change our model to closed source. Saying that, it is not open-source anymore today. But, we still post builds, demos and readme on GitHub
https://github.com/imgly/pesdk-html5-build, https://github.com/imgly/pesdk-android-demo,
and https://github.com/imgly/pesdk-ios-build.
Interesting! One more question. Do you think having an open-source version to start with helped you gain distribution / momentum / feedback early on? Or in the hindsight, do you think you should have started with a commercial license and not bother with open-source at all? The reason I am asking is that for https://scantobim.xyz, I offer a 30-day free trial. There are quite a few downloads but not many conversions. The product still needs to be improved but I need better feedback before I can improve it. Do you think making it free will help me increase distribution and feedback? I am worried that if it's free, people won't even be willing to talk to me over phone since there is nothing to be gained by them.
That is a pretty hard question to answer in general.
For us, I think being available on GitHub helped a lot, wether being open-source or not makes a difference, I cannot judge anymore.
Think of it more as something like a search channel, where others developers can find your product. Also when you decide to go open-source choose the right license. Take a look at our README. While the open-source version could be used non-commercial without charging, you had to get a paid license for commercial use.
For us the best feedback came from paying or potential paying customers which we work with really closely. We realized that our customers are not really interested in the code itself but the product and the experience surrounding it (support etc.). Ensure that you have a good and really accessible support channel. we setup slack and all developers joined. We also made sure that our READMEs and Website stated that, such that our potential customers could join slack and ask pressing questions and report bugs easily.
Thanks! This was helpful.
@neeravbm 3-4 years ago we changed our license such that you had to obtain a commercial license when you use it commercially while still being open-source on GitHub. This is the version you can see at https://github.com/imgly/imgly-sdk-html5.
I was wondering the same thing!
How does charging for open-source software work?
@rayandre Note that open-source != free sofware. It can be open-source but you can still charge for commercial use of the software when you choose the right license. For reference see our old README at https://github.com/imgly/imgly-sdk-html5/blob/master/LICENSE.md . This worked for us in the early years pretty well.
Curious, what type of license did you choose? Tried browsing for OSS but non-commercial licenses and can't seem to find one
Just because the software is open-source, does not mean you can't charge money for it. Even Richard Stallman himself has said it's perfectly fine. But there has to be some kind of value-add to make it worth it, otherwise who would buy it? Daniel mentions near the beginning of the interview that companies actually asked for a commercial license. Companies like to know their vendors won't go dark on them, so they are willing to pay money for a license that gives access to support, consulting, feature requests and other things. Lots of developers build companies around their open-source software and are very successful.
Agreed, and most of open-source companies have two forms of revenues: (1) consulting, and (2) premier features. I am not doubting PhotoEditor's revenue. I was just interested in knowing how they make money. If they are charging for the base product, I would like to know more about this business model especially since the code is open-source on GitHub, although they don't mention it on their website. So may be they are just selling access to the source code who didn't know that the code is open-source?
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Your argument would make sense if their product was a free or cheap ($5-$100) a month B2C service. But they are B2B, and of course won't have that much mainstream popularity. Plus B2B sales make FAR more money per sale $XX,XXX+. So all they really need is 10 separate large business clients for $XXX,XXX+
One license of their cheapest plan for small developers (up to 10k uses/month) is $179/month excluding 19% tax. They have customers like Zalando with millions of MAUs. I certainly believe their figures.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago