Ask HN: Can I really create a company around my open-source software?

65 points by darkhorse13 3 days ago | 57 comments

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-time license under BUSL. But that version was quite difficult to use because it only worked with Markdown files.

This time, I'm charging around $25/month in order to remove the branding. Everything else is completely free. Now this is the part I struggle with: I feel like the quality of the software is quite high and so is the output. But can this be an actually viable business model? I have really thought about just making it entirely free (even the branding removal) and just seeing it grow, but I would love to make some money from this and potentially even do this full-time (God willing). I spent months building this, and I constantly keep on doubting myself on what to do. I even hesitated to launch for 2 weeks because I was really anxious.

Any honest feedback on this? Could I actually make this into a company or do I need to start adding more features like backend, integrations, etc.? I'm kinda burned out at the moment, just left my day-job, so it's all a bit of a mess really. If anyone has any advice, I'm all ears. My email is also on my profile.

Some other questions:

- Should I go back to charging a one-time fee?

- How do I even reach out to potential customers/users?

bruce511 2 days ago | next |

I get that you've worked on this for months, that you're burned out generally, and now unemployed. So this comment is not meant as "mean" but rather offered in the spirit of encouragement.

Firstly, building a business (especially in a crowded space) is stressful. It's not a place to recover from burnout. It's not a place that reduces anxiety. So my first recommendation is to relax a bit, put this on the back burner, and when you're ready go look for your next job.

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.

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.

darkhorse13 a day ago | root | parent | next |

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.

Imustaskforhelp 21 hours ago | root | parent | next |

You're not alone in this matter. I myself as well also seem to by driven by such.

I have gotten some crazy ideas which I have implemented / are in the back burner (currently a student , but oh man)

This advice is generally right though. I also wish that there is an ideal way of doing things , like how linux manages the kernel he likes and he can live decently or some other project.

You might look at source-based like posthog , some api project used to be like this.

Its really hard earning money in open source. But if you do , that is all so great. Also starred your repo.

x0x0 20 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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.

That's not building a business, that's hoping you accidentally stumble into one.

Separately, developer tools are extremely hard to build a business around. You can know that by looking at how few success examples there are.

So, where to start:

1 - decide if you want to build a business (available evidence: you don't. you want to play with tech.)

2 - figure out how business work. For starters: you can't afford to reach out for a $25/mo product. Someone buying for a year only returns $300. You cannot make those economics work. But this is all easily learnable, certainly for anyone smart enough to be a competent engineer. But you have to want to.

2a - for typeform, lots of engineers can build that. We pay to not build, and especially not to operate, that.

3 - very candid interviews w/ one of the founders of tally.so are available discussing how the business works.

j45 20 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

Do not let yourself code if you’re good at shipping and learn the rest.

Or spend one week building and one week in market learning and getting feedback on it.

This has worked well for me.

mjr00 21 hours ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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 names and titles at specific companies; 2) why they would care about your product -- what pain point is it solving for them? what are the competitors/alternatives and what advantages do you offer? 3) how are they going to find out about your product; 4) how much are they willing to pay. I'd make sure to answer all these before writing the first line of code.

BrunoBernardino 2 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

bruce511 2 days ago | root | parent | next |

Firstly, I should say, there's no "formula" here. If there was I probably wouldn't post it on the internet :) Luck plays a part. (But you can work to give yourself more chance of good luck.)

If I had to try and distil it down, we dabbled a bit here an there, but what ultimately made the difference was "marketing". In the sense that we travelled quite a lot in the beginning, went looking for distributors (in international markets), tried to connect with potential customers wherever they hung out, and so on.

For example we make plug-ins to a very niche tool - but the users of that tool would have (in person) user groups - typically 10 to 15 people or so. I travelled the world going to those group meetings, organising meetups in places that didn't have them, showing an interest, and of course selling plugins. Today our user base is "established" and I hardly ever travel anymore.

For a major commercial product I visited similar markets to ours, knocked on the doors of distributors, tried to find people who wanted to integrate our product into their market. I failed a lot but succeeded twice, and those 2 have been paying us lots of money every year for 20 years as they make sales.

Your approach may vary. Start locally. Talk to shop keepers, restaurants, businesses, charities, schools and so on. Look for markets that are not serviced (which is different to where the person is just too cheap, or adverse to tech for other reasons.)

Of course it's a LOT harder now to find unserviced markets. There's a lot more software out there now than there was when I started out. Ultimately though it's about connecting with people - real people not just sending out spam emails. And so meeting the right person at the right time is "lucky". But if you're not out there luck can't work with you. You need to give luck a chance.

Imustaskforhelp 21 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

bruce511 9 hours ago | root | parent |

There's nothing wrong with having fun. The past couple years I've been dabbling in ceramics. It's lot of fun, and I have a lot of stuff now, but its a hobby not a business.

Frankly, making it a business would rob the fun from it. I like the randomness of it - making something and not knowing how it'll turn out.

In the same way coding can be fun. Work at your own pace on whatever you fancy. Finish it, or don't, no-one cares. When upu get bored with it, then stop.

This is a hobby, and hobbies are good. But hobbies are not a business. I have a day job to earn an income to give me time (and money) to indulge my hobby.

It's possible to turn your hobby into a business, but then it turns into work, not fun (it can be satisfying, and pleasurable but it comes with strict demands.)

So cool, dive into any projects you like, just don't be thinking that those projects will become businesses. (Its possible, but the risk is really low.) If you want to create a business then you need to focus on the business principles first.

leros 2 days ago | prev | next |

To make money, you have to solve a problem for somebody. The problem you solve has to be higher value than what you charge.

Given the plethora of existing form solutions out there, is there niche where you meet that criteria?

bluGill 21 hours ago | prev | next |

I didn't look close, but I'll bet a competent developer can remove the branding from your project (replacing with their own) in just a few hours. This perfectly legal and much cheaper than paying you $25. Sure the developer time might cost $100/hour or more, but getting your project through supply management and all the reviews will cost a lot more time and money than just doing it themselves.

You need to provide better value than removing branding is what I'm saying. There are lots of business models, but removing branding is not a good one.

jph 21 hours ago | prev | next |

Great software. I can pay you, if you're able to do professional services work implement forms.md within a startup codebase, in both Django and Svelte. Email joel@joelparkerhenderson.com.

arekkas 20 hours ago | prev | next |

Hello, founder of Ory (https://github.com/ory) here. I‘ve spent 5+ years writing code, never thinking anyone would pay for it. Today, Ory is a healthy business but the road there was extremely stressful.

I‘ve felt the same as you many times over, and I have had bad experiences along the way. In the end it still feels that it was worth it. I get to own and work on things I enjoy.

For me, taking on VC capital was the stepping stone for today‘s success, but that was necessary due to the complexity of IAM and the system criticality it has (single point of failure). It’s essentially impossible to do something like Ory without outside money.

Generally speaking I felt that libraries are harder to monetize than APIs, but looking at your website you already have a service! Monetize the service, keep the OSS free (but maybe don’t make everything OSS).

One thing we open source people are bad at is valuing our own work (because we publish it for free). But experience has shown me that people are willing to pay if the service is valuable enough even if you can get it for free otherwise. So many companies spend 100k, 200k, 2M ln bad software. Why should they not spend 100k with your good product?

If you don’t want to have a boss and don’t want to live on someone else’s terms (yes VCs, customers and others tell you what you SHOULD do, but you can still do it differently and they will applaud you when it works), keep doing what you‘re doing and don‘t be afraid to ask MORE money for it, not less.

To get to 250k to support yourself, you will have to sell a lot of subscriptions. So maybe the value lies elsewhere? Integrations, customization? Number of form fills? Bot protection? Your customers/adopters typically tell you what‘s valuable - but don’t do it all for free!

Looking at your repo it has some traction, but you probably need to build it up a bit more with marketing (wether that‘s cool new tech, or just posting it in the right places is up to you). If you have a couple of companies that are interested in using it and need support, sell them support for 10k, 20k, 30k a year and learn what they need, build it, and sell it to them again. Why build stuff for free if the customer is making money with it?

I believe you can do this!

If you are bootstrapped, don‘t try to mimic typeform subscriptions will only work with sufficient capital and a lot of upselling. Self-service subscription selling is hell and requires huge infra and marketing budgets. Try to find a couple of customers that pay you well and expand from there.

aimazon 20 hours ago | prev | next |

I am glad to see you renamed to forms from blocks :) I am not saying that your work is bad but even if your work is bad you can make money hand over fist so questions of "good" or "bad" are immaterial[1].

As a solo developer walking a well-worn path you're in a fortunate position. You can poach customers from competitors and differentiate based on customer's having direct engagement with you, the founder, and price, because you don't have expensive developers to pay.

Identify a single use-case that your software is good for today, and then spend some time identifying prospective customers based on companies using your competitors for that use-case, then reach out and undercut your competitors based on your values. A competitor's case study / customer stories page is the classic poachers first port of call.

Persistence will pay off. Most of your outreach will fail, most of your ideas will fall flat, most of what you think matters won't matter and most of what you think doesn't matter will matter. That's okay.

Anything can be made into a company. Can you make this into a company? Nobody really knows until you've tried, but the idea has potential and you have the necessary skills to pull it off so there's no reason it shouldn't be possible.

The biggest difference between developers who write software and founders of software companies is a focus on customers. If you're struggling to see a clear path forward, it's a sign that you are probably spending too much time writing code and not enough time thinking about / talking to customers. You'll know you're doing enough business things when you start to feel like you're letting the software slip.

[1] I think it's great but that would undercut my point that it doesn't matter

darkhorse13 20 hours ago | root | parent |

Thank you, and yep the name change made sense to me too.

> You'll know you're doing enough business things when you start to feel like you're letting the software slip

I needed to hear that.

marko-k 20 hours ago | prev | next |

I’d pivot away from targeting developers and focus on "normal" power users—maybe even pick a specific vertical. Most devs won’t pay for a form builder, but people *will* pay for beauty and ease of use (which is why Typeform works). If you want paying users, you’ll probably need to add integrations so they don’t have to mess with the backend.

Also, I’d rethink the UX for the AI era. Instead of a traditional form builder, what if users just *described* the form they need, and AI generated it instantly? Then they could refine it with natural language—“Add an email field” or “Make question 3 optional”. That way, they go from zero to a polished form in seconds.

You already have the structured data and the code logic—you'd just have to build the AI integration. Luckily, most of the models can speak JSON now with structured outputs, so it's entirely possible.

throwup238 21 hours ago | prev | next |

I hate to be the Debbie Downer here, but the answer is no. The first thing I saw on your home page was `npm install formsmd` which tells me two things (unfair as it is): first that you aren’t focused on sales - which is what makes money - and second that you’re selling to developers which are probably one of the worst target markets to sell to. They’re skeptical, demanding, and an all around onerous bunch.

There’s no reason you can’t try this out as a slow burn side project that may one day - many years from now - turn into a reliable income that frees you from the usual rat race plantation job, but this is not something you should do while unemployed and burned out. You brushed it off but the other sibling comment that said that is 100% correct. STOP. You will not go viral and get a thousand monthly subscribers overnight. You can still work on this project as therapy for your burnout, but you must go into it with zero delusions of short term financial viability.

“I just run head-first into development” does not make money. Sales and marketing make money. If you don’t even have an idea of what that would really look like, this will only end in tears.

On the other hand, how many sales have you and will you make from this post? That may change the calculus w.r.t. virality if you can figure out how to do some more quality advertising. But if it’s going to work you need a mind shift from developer to entrepreneur.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 21 hours ago | root | parent | next |

> you’re selling to developers

That was my first thought. He's selling a piece of software to me, and I can patch the library in a few minutes to remove the branding and avoid paying $25/month.

darkhorse13 19 hours ago | root | parent | prev |

No honestly I appreciate the feedback. I've always worked as a dev, so that's all I really know, but I'm sure I can pick up some other skills and change my mindset. At the very least, I could find a cofounder.

marshughes 13 hours ago | prev | next |

Regarding the business model, for the pricing of $25 per month to remove the branding, it depends on how much the target audience cares about the branding. Have you conducted any user research to understand their acceptance of brand display and how much they are willing to pay to remove the branding? If the target group is not very sensitive to the brand, this pricing strategy may need to be adjusted. As for whether to charge a one - time fee or a subscription fee, it mainly depends on the product update frequency and the user usage cycle. If the product is updated frequently, the subscription model may be more appropriate; if the functions are relatively stable, a one - time fee may be more attractive to users. Which situation do you think Forms.md belongs to?

wavemode 20 hours ago | prev | next |

I will echo the sentiment of some other commenters - you have to decide who you're selling to, and flesh out the product more to suit that customer.

If you're selling to non-developers? They don't know what npm is. They don't know how the Web works. They will need you to provide them with a one-click solution. Typeform (the product you stated you're competing with) has a visual editor and provides hosting. It's a one-stop shop.

On the other hand, if you're selling to developers - nobody's gonna want to pay for just a form library. A frontend developer can build a form in 10 minutes. Open-source has taken over so much that, nowadays the only money in selling software to developers is in editing tools (like IDE's, AI tools, etc.) or cloud-based solutions. If you're just selling the software itself with no cloud hosting, it's gotta be something really useful and really complex, like a database or an operating system.

I think things like form builders do get somewhat close to the "solutions architect" market. That is, you may be able to sell a version of your software to people who build websites for other people. Take a look at sites like themeforest.net. Creating themes and plugins for content management systems (like wordpress, squarespace, weebly etc.) and selling them to freelancers can earn decent money.

darkhorse13 19 hours ago | root | parent |

You're right, there's definitely a mismatch in the product right now. These types of forms are generally made by non-devs, and non-devs can't really be expected to use an npm library to build forms.

vednig 2 days ago | prev | next |

As a person who's somehow managed to build something innovative, I believe you can.

Look for Redis, MongoDB and millions of other companies

Advice: It's important to make people believe your product is a necessity or an upgrade over others until you can expect them to pay for it. Hence, you need your products and support to be the top priority for the next generation.

PS: I'm also interested in reaching out to you for partnership if you're okay with it?

fizx 20 hours ago | prev | next |

Are you able to add 3-5 customers per month at the 25/mo level? If so there's a chance. If that many customers are signing up with just you and minimal marketing, you could probably 10x that with channel partners, then start working towards an enterprise version or additional marketing.

Another signal would be that you are able to successfully add a co-founder.

If it takes more than 6mo of post-launch to those milestones, I'd give up on the idea. Market's probably saturated or you're not solving a pain point.

Things only get more stressful. I'd work on backup plans or some job searching during those six months. Its nice to do the job search when the side project gets too much and vice versa. Also, it can be a nice side project if you re-enter the workforce.

Source: bootstrapped a SaaS company to several million in revenue.

anitil 2 days ago | prev | next |

I really like the demos and landing page, I think it's a good product. I also thought your gsheet integration was interesting, if a bit rough around the edges.

I really think that the integration is going to be the product here, rather than licensing the library itself.

Say I'm in marketing and want to do a user survey. I want a way to get the users to the form (a link in the product? an email? a popover? A QR code for in-person businesses? Maybe something you can think about), I want a form that looks good (which yours does), I want to brand it, and I want the data somehow (maybe immediately, maybe after some time, maybe with a dashboard who knows). What I don't want to do is mess about with gsheet permissions and app scripts.

darkhorse13 a day ago | root | parent |

Thanks for the feedback. Yep, definitely want to work on a form backend next. As mentioned in the original post, I built this on the side and it was a looot of work. Hopefully it will get easier from here.

smokel 21 hours ago | prev | next |

If you persevere but don't succeed, please let us know in, say, one year time.

I'd be happy to support $10 for a story of failure. It would be tremendously helpful as a counterweight to all the free success stories out there.

jankcorn 20 hours ago | prev | next |

Instead of looking at your high quality software as an "asset to monetize", I would recommend thinking of it as a "way to introduce your high quality skills to attract high quality customers that are more than willing to pay for your time".

This allows you to get money for customizing the software for specific applications, but still build up a valuable asset over time (instead of just being a T&M slave).

codr7 21 hours ago | prev | next |

From my own experience; as soon as I start thinking about revenue for personal projects, I start making the wrong choices.

Which makes sense, the reason I'm doing them in the first place is for learning, sharing and fun.

I believe the only way forward is to keep focusing on those aspects and let the rest happen by itself.

https://github.com/codr7/tyred-java

a-r-t 20 hours ago | prev | next |

You mentioned Django, but I couldn't find much on your website about how it works with your forms. Will I have to manually replicate all form fields on the client side? Will it work with Django form validation and show errors? I'd suggest creating a documentation page for each framework you mentioned to explain how it will work together.

evantbyrne 20 hours ago | prev | next |

You should consider licensing the core project more restrictively with something like a FSL. Regardless, there may be more of a market in selling "pro" licenses to plugins for projects like WordPress, Shopify, Payload, Craft CMS, etc that include integrations with 3rd party services.

bitbasher 19 hours ago | prev | next |

I wouldn't sell brand removal.

I would have a private version of the software with additional features. I would keep a simple free open source version to help upsell the "pro" version.

The pro version can come with maintenance, new features, etc.

The question on my mind is.. how big is this market? I have no idea.

thecleaner 2 hours ago | prev | next |

Say the words "fuck it" and launch the paid version. Launch it here on HN / Reddit/ Linkedin wherever. The point is not to ensure your product succeeds but rather to try abd disprove your thesis of "this is good". Get detached, software aint precious just disposable.

satvikpendem 2 days ago | prev | next |

I've looked into the company Tally.so, it's also completely free and charges for removing branding and adding collaboration. Last I checked, they are at around $150k MRR [0], they have lots of posts and podcasts on how they did it, you could follow their playbook.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1gpn8gt/how_we_bootst...

caro_kann 21 hours ago | root | parent | next |

Past couple of months, I've been researching how to market a product and how to "put your product out there". What was I learned that creating tutorials and writing blogs about your product will help to reach people naturally. Looks like this really helps as this company did.

darkhorse13 a day ago | root | parent | prev |

This was really useful, thank you so much. Reading Tally's story only strengthened my resolve.

satvikpendem 9 hours ago | root | parent |

Yep they're quite similar to what you're trying to do it looks like, the more competitors the better. If you made it open source then it'd be an even greater force multiplier, like Cal.com vs Calendly.

HeyLaughingBoy 21 hours ago | prev | next |

> - How do I even reach out to potential customers/users?

My only suggestion is that you focus on this above everything else. Once you have an answer, then go back and consider the other questions.

svilen_dobrev 21 hours ago | prev | next |

check this thread on another open-source-into-company - timefold - (from last week):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999454

and, suggestion for the no-api-required part: maybe something like hasura.io , that makes an api out of data-model/form. Though such survey-like data may go into kind of data-lake..? may be look at interfacing those as well..

kittikitti 21 hours ago | prev | next |

I would start freelancing and search for gigs that are related. Clients would love to see such a useful and polished product.

milesvp 20 hours ago | prev | next |

Youtube has been feeding me a lot of business advice lately. If you are truly interested in pivoting from tech to sales. Right now the best advice is coming from Alex Hormozi (ignore some of his hard work ethos, it’s not nuanced enough until you’ve watched enough of his content). The amount of content he is giving away is criminal, he’s using it as marketing, but he is almost never selling anything, so it doesn’t feel slimey the way most of this content space feels. Chris Do used to have excellent content for getting paid as a creator, his recent stuff isn’t very good though.

I will tell you, if your solution solves a problem that is only painful enough that people might pay $25 a month, you are likely going to have a really hard time with this business. Sales is disproportionately harder the smaller the dollar amount. Also, if you are not willing to give up the first 4 productive hours of your day to sales and marketing you will probably fail.

Ultimately I think the open source doesn’t matter much. You have a solution to a problem. You need to market that solution to people who have the problem, and take their money while they are still in pain. Whether they could have found the solution to their problem through the open source channel is largely irrelevant if you have good enough sales channels to find people who don’t know to look for your free solution. Looking at your site now, I’d be very inclined to remove the free option. The era of freemium is sort of over. You want to be able to give something free to your unqualified leads, but it looks like you want to give away too much with it. You can maintain the npm channel, but it should not be part of your marketing for the paid product. It can still maybe be part of the onboarding process, I haven’t looked at your solution enough to understand what onboarding should look like.

Also, I suspect $25/mo is too little. Pricing is a form of marketing, and too low a price attracts the wrong kind of customers. There have been numerous threads here on HN talking about the quality of customers when adding a zero to their price.

Another thing I noticed on the forms.md page, is it wasn’t clear to me what pain I needed to have that your solution provides. All I know from your page is that if I want to build forms you can help with that, but you haven’t reminded me of what is painful about building forms, or even that it might be difficult. Let alone how your solution will make those pains go away.

There is also no price anchor. You absolutely need 3 pricing tiers on a landing page. One should be high enough you’re embarrased about it. $20 should absolutely be the lowest tier with the expectation that no one should want it. The middle price is what you want to sell for, and it has a slight goldie locks problem, but you can dial that in once you have enough sales.

Good luck.

j45 20 hours ago | prev |

If you are self funded it will be much harder to do free or freemium.

If you are funded it’s a way to build trust.

If you’re looking for ideas don’t build a generic form tool. Ding places where forms are so horrible according to the words of strangers who have to fill them out or better yet deal with submitted forms - ask to learn more to see if you could help.

The amount of time and salary you save is what it’s worth.

Two books I highly recommend checking out is software as a science (it’s recent and relevant) as well as the saas playbook (yellow cover). These will shed some light on how the 97% of entrepreneurs who do not or can not raise still find a path to success.