I have worked for a company that did / does a lot of money by providing a closed-source CMS for mainly Rails apps to its clients.
I must say that getting paying customers for any CMS is a lot of work.
If you are going for larger companies, you need to have an entire sales department that is going to try selling your product together with customized solution.
Actually, what worked best for that company was selling a licensed CMS + consulting and building really customized solutions.
Maybe your business could work out this way too, but with an open-source model at the core. You could extend the open source version with some enterprisy features, charge for it and offer support and consultancy in order to build truly customized solutions.
Still, the really tricky part, is selling the product in a market that is pretty crowded by now.
It seems like we're heading in that direction. One thing that LocomotiveCMS did bring us is clients who need a custom CMS. In most cases, they'll start from some of Locomotive features and we build whatever they need from there. These are usually high quality clients though it means that we have way less time to devote to the open source version.
I must say that getting paying customers for any CMS is a lot of work.
If you are going for larger companies, you need to have an entire sales department that is going to try selling your product together with customized solution.
Actually, what worked best for that company was selling a licensed CMS + consulting and building really customized solutions.
Maybe your business could work out this way too, but with an open-source model at the core. You could extend the open source version with some enterprisy features, charge for it and offer support and consultancy in order to build truly customized solutions.
Still, the really tricky part, is selling the product in a market that is pretty crowded by now.