Show HN: I've open-sourced my ERP SaaS, Stockor
For the last several years I've been creating a ERP platform, Stockor. While I'm going to continue offering it as a SaaS, I've decided to also open-source it.
I'm hopeful that by doing so it will: 1) Grow it into a Wordpress size juggernaut with a plugin for any business process under the sun. 2) Bring me interesting consulting gigs.
The open-source site is at stockor.org. There's a demo up at stockor.com/demo as well.
Looking forward to hearing HN's thoughts!
27 comments
[ 22.9 ms ] story [ 509 ms ] threadYou can make a ton of money in the ERP business, even if your product isn't very good. So if you're losing hope that stockor.com is going to bring in serious money anytime soon, it's probably because you need to focus way more on your onboarding experience and quality of the stockor.com website.
I haven't lost hope on stockor.com at all. I'm hoping that the open-source version will drive additional attention to stockor.com and I'll pick up more customers from it.
The basic problem I've ran into is credibility with customers. They're understandably reluctant to trust their entire business to some guy over the internet. I believe that if I can point out that the code is open and they can always migrate to running it themselves it should alleviate their reluctance.
Really it's kind of a no-brainer to pay me to host it at a few hundred a month vs hiring an IT guy.
People can spend plenty of time arguing the merits of those frameworks, but they were pretty much built for guys like you who are programmers and could use opinionated UI that's passed review in someone's design department. Use a theme/skinning site like bootswatch.com to throw in some variety with colors/typography and still have some thought put in the small details like "what should be the relative difference between your font sizes?"
Between your personal branding and the impressions created by first glances at your product, you can have some easy wins with credibility.
In fact the website is built entirely on bootstrap and Backbone.js Using my liquid_assets gem I've managed to make it searchable as well. I use the sass version of Bootstap and allow the user to modify the colors from the management side.
You only need one "recognised name" to come on board, who does decent volumes, and you can bootstrap off the back of such fairly straightforwardly - you just have to work their network, by which I mean, be aware of who they know, who will be watching, and either reach out to them or make it a no-brainer for them to reach out to you.
"It's 11 o'clock in the morning, do you know where your inventory is?" and I'm reading the page at 11 o'clock? Creepy
Everything looks very polished, I've never worked with an ERP before but I didn't know it could include your customer-facing website and process orders directly. I guess that's what ERP is for...
Thanks for the kind words! Once I get it all finalized I'm also hopping for additional plugins to extend it way beyond ERP. Time trackers - I'm looking at you.
Stockor handles the entire supply chain from purchasing inventory to managing it and customer relations. You'd use Stockor to manage all your business processes behind the scenes.
Now that stocker's open-source I'd expect someone to write a shopify adapter for it. I've got an Amazon one already written that I'll be releasing soon.
The demo stuff was laking good test data on most pages. That was my initial thought.
I've auto-generated the data using the Ruby Faker gem and the API. I would like to locate better product descriptions and images but haven't been able to find a good open source for them yet.
The scripts I used to do so are at: https://github.com/argosity/stockor-scripts
Key questions I would immediately ask an ERP vendor that I do not see answered on your homepage:
- What kind of interfaces/APIs does Stockor provide? Both for in-house systems (analytics, whatever) as well as externals (EDIFACT, etc.).
- Is there some sort of pricing engine to fully calculate an order? How flexible is it?
I assume this is US only? If not, then what about languages, currencies, etc?
It is 100% API driven using a a JSON REST api. As part of the open-sourcing process I'll be documenting that, but it isn't currently documented at all.
The pricing engine is lacking compared to other ERP implementations. Right now it does per-customer pricing with quantity breaks, but it doesn't have the concept of pricing libraries like others do. I do have experience implementing those but just haven't gotten it done yet. I agree that'll be really important for larger enterprises.
It is US only at the moment, mainly because I have no experience with VAT and European accounting. If someone was willing to work with me on it to discuss how it all works that'd be awesome...
You'll probably want to check out the _root/index.html and stylesheets/os-progress.scss for the gauge.
https://github.com/nighthawk-apps/sERP
For proper manufacturing we'd have to expand that to generate a build order and factor labor into the GL postings.
It's on my informal roadmap but no idea when/if it'll get done. If you're interested in sponsoring that, I'd love to talk! (nathan@argosity.com)
I'm in talks with a designer for a dinosaur themed logo though since something about the name sounds like Raptor and I think that might be kinda neat.
He liked it because he have access to my data without the need to come to my office.
So you might try to get accountant/bookkeepers to like it so they can be your trustbuilders!?
Of course, getting an accountant is probably a harder sell ;)