Should I go open-source or give free trial and then charge the users?

1 points by akarshhegde18 ↗ HN
Built a product that runs on your machine, understands your work and takes care of your Jira task updates for you. No data leaves your machine

11 comments

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Would you pay for this? And what would be the expectation?
Sounds cool but not like something anyone would pay for, so I would suggest open source.

If you want to monetize it go SaaS for enterprise but this is probably the worst time for that.

What do you mean this is the worst time for saas?
The answer to your question depends on your goals. Without understanding what outcomes you are hoping for it's difficult to reply.

You should also tell us more about your market research. Who is your target customer? (Are you expecting the Jira user to pay? Or the company they work for?)

Or do you want users, but not money?

IME Jira tends to be used by people at larger organizations, who likely have strict "what you can install" rules. Which would make this an Enterprise sale.

But anyway, tell us more about who you built this for, and how you intend to reach them.

The product runs on the machine locally, captures accessibility/screen ocr and takes care of your Jira task updates. No data leaves the machine

This is where it is right now, but the idea is that it does all the developer overhead automatically. No more manual Jira updates, Doc updates, Slack response, etc. No more losing context mid-flow.

Thats the context, what are your thoughts?

That's your product description. It doesn't really matter.

What matters is that you identify who your customer is (ie who is writing the check) and how you plan to reach them.

Selling to mid-level-managers at orgs running Jira sounds tough. But hopefully you have a few you know, and have lined up gor sales already.

Good luck.

I think I wanna target customers who are in small and medium scale orgs, where they use some standard tool like jira/linear but don't have a hard security team blocker. Target developers who are focusing on improving their efficiency individually and then our enterprise version will be for those teams that want to improve the overall teams efficiency by reducing mundane work and giving them insights on what their team can do better each week
You call them "customers" not "users", implying you'd like to earn money from this? In which case no, I don't think you should Open Source it. Getting paid for Open Source, especially by companies, is unlikely.

You have a product targeting orgs big enough to use Jira. That's a tough market to be in. Hope you've done your market research and have a sales strategy figured out.

If you don't, then consider this a good learning exercise. Do the hard parts first (marketing, sales etc.) The code is the easy part, do that last.