BY: REUVEN COHEN

With our first open source Product, Enomalism launching next week, I thought I'd post my two cents about open source product development,

In working with several commercial open source partners recently, we have learned a number of lessons.

Your partners are your biggest competitors; use this to your advantage.

Charging your partners for the honour of being a partner will limit your partnership network and limit your market penetration. If your partners want support charge them for it, but don’t make it a requirement.

This may seem obvious, make your product easy to install and even easier use.

Have potential revenue streams other then support. Support is personnel & time intensive and doesn’t scale easily.

Selling free software on a hardware appliance is an easy sell gives your customers a reason to buy.

If you're charging for enterprise features, make sure they are truly features that your enterprise user want. In our case, we’re launching a virtualized management system for xen, the open source version let’s user manage one physical server, great for hobbist etc, for more demanding enterprise users we’ll offer an additional multi server add-on, as well as web hosting management options. Almost half of the inquires we’ve received were from hosting companies, so we decided to create a hosting add-on. This is a benefit of a pre-beta site, I’ll explain this further in a bit.

Be prepared to make deals, bundle and give away your services. The more users the better.

Keep your revenue model simple. If you have a 10 page document describing it, it's probably to complex and will fail. 

Pre-beta - This is commonly referred as vaporware, but is an ideal form of market research. We’ve had 30,000 visitors and more then 700 inquires before we actually started development. This helped determine where the interest was, who they were, how much they we willing to pay and features they wanted. We are launching with a substantial potential customer list thanks in part to this very public development phase. Hopefully this mean we don't have to wait 12 months before see revenue. I suppose we'll find out next week!