I'm Didier Lafforgue, the guy behind LocomotiveCMS, one of the 2 first open source projects handled by Bushi.do. So I will speak for the open source developer inside me.
I won't say that building an open source project is quite easy but the coding part is definitively the easiest one for me. Unfortunately, a developer does not live with fresh water and (coding) love.
So when Sean and Kevin came to me and shared with me their vision about monetizing open source projects, it was obvious I had no choice than to say yes. Simply because their idea is brillant.
Actually, it lets the freedom for the authors of open source web applications to continue their development roadmap and at the same time, Bushi.do provides all the tools to promote and monetize the applications. I see that as a win-win situation.
And to go further, that could be become a game changer in the world of the open source web applications.
One last thing, the 2 guys behind Bushi.do are developers first and very nice guys....
Hey Ryan, sorry for the contentless splash page. We're building up the platform and documentation right now, and as we get closer, the work on that side gets even more intense. We'll put up a video explaining everything later tonight.
In the meantime, we're launching Bushido as a really simple way to launch Open-source rails apps with one click, a unified log-in system, and premium hosting. We do a revenue share with the developers, so all you do is write the app, put up a link that has the url to your rails' app git repo, which branch to deploy from, and any environmental variables you want the app to launch with (so you can customize it at launch time), and then anyone can instantly launch the app. If they end up converting to premium hosting (based on a few factors like number of allowed user signins and apps), we'll split the revenue with you.
The goal is to help developers be more and more independent working on their projects of passion, and to app users way more choice in the apps they can use.
Let me know if you have any more questions, s@gobushido.com!
I remember when Bushido made the front-page of HN a few months ago (search for details). I was pretty pumped then and am even more so now.
One thing that's been on my mind lately is help desk software. The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?) [1], especially when it's best for everyone at a startup to wear the support hat now and then. Not to mention the fact that some lock in your data.
We once used a home-built ticket system for support (a Rails 2.3.x app that's available at https://github.com/bigfolio/big-help). I'm seriously considering re-writing this app in Rails 3.1 and putting it up on Bushido. The biggest feature request I've seen is the ability to handle incoming emails as tickets, and that's now easy with MailGun or SendGrid.
All that to say I think Bushido could really disrupt some industries (even recent ones) that are over-priced or handcuff customers with arbitrary limits.
The current leaders are way overpriced IMO ($9 to $49 per month per agent–are you serious?)
I'm assuming these services are targeting companies with people working full time on support, where that $9 to $49 is a drop in a bucket compared to their salary.
That's the problem. Even small startups use them. Imagine a 4-person startup with 2 co-founders, another engineer and another designer. No full-time support staff, so everyone jumps in from time to time. Unless you make a generic agent account (which is lame for assignment/follow-up), you're talking $100/mo for support.
I don't discount the value extracted but to me it reeks of enterprise, per-seat licensing a bit.
I just think an OS, unlimited agent option would be nice for small startups.
As someone who sits on the other side of that equation, $9/month basically translates to "1 support request per month".
I've been meaning to do a blog post on such, but an average single support request costs us around $8. So if you've got a business where the average number of support requests per user are dramatically less than 1.0 per user per month, then it can work out, but I suspect there's a proportional support load to those SaaS systems that you're looking at where it's closer to, say, 0.5 per seat. If you lower the price beyond $9/month, then all of the sudden your profit evaporates.
It's non-obvious until you run the numbers, but it goes something like this:
Support Person Salary $60,000.00
Fully Loaded Employee Cost $90,000.00
Per Hour $46.88
Support Requests / Hour 6
Cost / Request $7.81
That's actually why we removed our $9/month plan. It was just hard to get excited about helping someone out when you realized after the first mail you were going into the hole for such.
The interesting thing for where Bushido fits into that is that in some ways it'd be pushing things towards utility pricing (the same way a lot of the cloud sort of stuff has done) -- i.e. the cost of supporting a software stack would be proportional to the cost you generate further up the chain, rather than based on some metric of an "average customer".
If I built a product that allowed you to answer support requests 10% faster, then logically you'd be happy paying an additional $750/month per support person for the software?
• No, you can't set your pricing to capture all of the theoretical value that your product creates. Otherwise it's a wash. Also, there's friction in any system, so you not only have to create value (that I get to keep), but do so enough to justify the switching costs.
• No, not unless you have no competitors. And if you have a generic solution to lower support costs by 10%, if you don't have competitors now, you will soon.
• No, software pricing isn't rational. Oh, how I wish it were at times. But in general, unless you're an amazing salesman, your prices have to be at a level that to the customer feel "about right".
I once worked in the customer service division of a company which had, well, let me call it a hundred CSRs. We had an internal application to do everything.
They didn't exactly show me the company budget, but I'm as capable of counting engineers as the next guy. Suffice it to say we paid way more than $75k a month for the productivity gains of that custom app. (It was my first encounter with Enterprise Software (TM) and I think I went into programming in part so that no one should ever again have to suffer like us CSRs suffered...)
You're also talking $20,000 a month in direct costs if you're paying that engineer and designer market wages, or about $10,000 if you're paying them its-not-exploitation-if-you-have-equity-wages. If next to these numbers you think $100 for software is a lot of money, you are not a desirable client.
It's a lot of money compared to what they spend on other essential SaaS products. A GitHub account for that same team would only cost $12/mo. Bug tracking (assuming you're not using GitHub's), $29/mo. 2 1GB Linode plans, $80/mo. Email from Google Apps, $0/mo.
I think it's less about "a lot of money" and more about there being plenty of room for a competitor. Especially one with a "$49/mo for unlimited agents" model.
Just as an additional anecdote, I've heard this sentiment repeated just about everywhere in SF, especially where companies try to involve developers in support in a rotating fashion.
Like I said, definitely contact me, I think there could be something very interesting for everyone here :)
Hey Erik, awesome note! We actually have some crazy-awesome api's for handling incoming emails - each app has a default email address provisioned for it, and an app can add/remove email accounts programmatically. And handling incoming email is done through a very cool hook system we're really excited to share soon.
Each app that's deployed has a bunch of resources automatically provisioned for it, so as a developer, you never have to wonder if something's present - the goal is to make the developer omnipotent, so you can do whatever you're thinking of, without thinking about it too much :)
Feel free to shoot me an email at s@gobushido.com, we'd really love to talk to you about the help-desk app (even we're looking for a good one)!
Edit: Forgot to add: the incoming/outgoing email stuff is powered by Mailgun actually - those guys are so awesome. With the wrapper we add though, and because we're very language-focused right now, we can make the api's a joy to use, beyond what even they're able to do currently.
I thought it sounded intriguing until I realized your entire codebase has to be public. Are there actually any popular SaaS products that are 100% open-source? Releasing open-source components and libraries spun off from your app is one thing, but open-sourcing the whole codebase that constitutes the core of your business? Is that done?
Like sean said, "it won't be for everyone", but there's already a ton of OpenSource apps in Ruby alone (mentioning it coz thats what we support right now) that are old but still work fabulously and are useful.
If you have apps like these, that you think others would find useful, mail me (akash@gobushido.com) and I'll help you with porting it to Bushido. And if you are using Devise for auth, we have a plugin and it's 5 lines of code promise! Most apps that we've ported, we've ensured that they work fine outside of Bushido too (opensource is giving back. right? :)
There are a ton of benefits to the model - it won't be for everyone, but it'll be for a lot more people once we get going at full speed. Open source is, in general, just more practical.
And yeah, there are a handful of SaaS products that are open-sourced, but most aren't maintained to a high-enough quality for our tastes. We'll work with developers to up the standard.
I remember first reading about Bushido at http://swombat.com/2011/4/12/bushido. After reading the blog post, I gave Bushido a spin, and their service really felt like magic. I got to know this team as part of the YC S11 batch, and they're building an awesome company that's giving back to open source. Lots of good things in their future.
A good concept, I hope their execution will be excellent and they have some marketing skills, because the latter is what will be hardest in this sector. Everyone can make a single sign-on platform with benefits, but getting those customers - now therein lies the rub.
I hope you guys succeed, because I would love to integrate with such a platform.
I hope you guys succeed, because I would love to integrate with such a platform.
You don't have to wait. Just get back to me at akash@gobushido.com and I'll help you port your Rails apps to Bushido. Bonus points if you are using Devise coz we have a plugin for it that makes it so much easier.
It also sounds like a recipe for bad-blood in the open source world. It emphasizes owning a repo rather than contributing to one that already exists.
It also seems to push for over utilization of resources. Once you get to say 1-10K installs a multi-tenant solution would probably make more sense. What happens then? Does bushido help you roll your customers into one big app? Even if it's not good for bushido's bottom line?
Don't get me wrong, I see a lot of good and interesting things coming from this. I just also see some sticky situations.
It emphasizes owning a repo rather than contributing to one that already exists.
Something that's been under discussion for a while at Bushido.
Does bushido help you roll your customers into one big app?
No. Each instance of an app runs in it's own sandboxed environment. That helps you keep your app simple and not worry about scaling for those 10k users. If you want a simpler perspective to look at the service - it sort of provides web apps like mobile apps. Separate instances like how they run on your phone. So tomorrow if there's an online editor app (like Google Docs. Just saying...) on Bushido and you have a Chromebook-like device, you can launch your own instance and that'll all be yours like a separate app. Once there's support for more platforms it'll be easier to see it as "app store for the web". All apps on the web and all you do is launch an instance of apps for yourself.
I'm about to launch something (hopefully going live tonight, announce tomorrow) with a similar philosophy - the economic engine of Open Source needs some more octane!
Hope this takes off, I hope I can partner with these guys in the future.
