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In my business we have 3 main product lines

… In my business we have 3 main product lines. The first 2 happened because the market paid us to build a solution. We iterated on those for 30 years, and we now are big players (in very niche spaces.) The 3rd happened as a take-over of a project by another retiring developer. He had a few customers, and a good product, but in a crowded space where there's lots of reasons not to change. It's taken many years to build it out, despite being clearly better than the competition, and it's still barely profitable (if you ignore a bunch of expenses paid by the whole business. ) The lesson being to follow the money, not the idea. (Aside, early on we followed some ideas, all those projects died, most without generating any revenue.) So congratulations to seeing something through to release. But turning a product into a business is really hard. Turning a commodity like this into a business is almost impossible. I wish you well in your future endeavors.

Original discussionAsk HN: Can I really create a company around my open-source software?66 source comments · at import
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DA

This is a serious question because I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a great business person. Also genuinely not trying to just promote my software either, but looking for some advice and feedback. I recently built and launched Forms.md, which is an open source JS library that lets you create multi-step forms and surveys. The forms themselves are very similar to what you would find on Typeform. The library works anywhere you can run JS, so it works with all web tech stacks: Django, Rails, React, Angular, etc. The library itself is just the front-end form builder, there is no backend because I expect people to just submit their forms directly to their database as that should be fairly easy to set up. It's also licensed under Apache-2.0. Website: https://forms.md Repo: https://github.com/formsmd/formsmd Some backstory, this was initially known as blocks.md, and I was charging for a one…

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BR

This is a great answer, thank you! Do you have any suggestions on how to "find a market"? What did you do, if you can share that? I think that would be incredibly helpful for the OP and many others.

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DA

You know I 100% agree with your advice, but I can never follow it in practice. I just run head-first into development, driven by a nebulous vision that I can't properly explain. Forms.md is the peak of that experience for me haha. Thanks for the comment and support though, again I 100% think this is solid advice, but I also believe it certainly does not apply to everyone/all products out there.

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IM

I had created an hackernews post about ideas and whatnot and I had also gotten such similar advice. Yeah , you're most likely right. But as the next HN commentor (darkhorse13) just below it said , Its just too tempting to not do it.

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MJ

Excellent advice. > Secondly, treat this project as an education. You had an idea and spent months implementing it. That's the easy part. The hard part is finding a market willing to pay money for something. So for your next project do the hard part first. First find a market, find out what they will spend, ideally collect a small deposit (to prove they're serious) and then go from there. Absolutely. As engineers, we want to focus on the things we find fun, which is building software. But decisions like "should I use Rust or Python? GCP or AWS or bare metal? procedural, OOP, or reactive functional actor model?" are so incredibly irrelevant for running a business. It's all sales, sales, sales, and marketing (which feeds into sales). If I were starting a business from scratch again today, the things I'd start with are: 1) who is buying this product -- if it's B2B be extremely specific with…

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