Partner program

Sorry to hear that

Well, take care and get better !

I’m not so sure Collabpad is the right entity for this (but I don’t have a problem doing it there if it makes the most sense). I’ve got some interesting ideas for a product with that name though.

I’d really like to see the support organization behind it all have an international presence without question.

Quote from: rthrash at Mar 27, 2008, 04:32 PM

I’m not so sure Collabpad is the right entity for this (but I don’t have a problem doing it there if it makes the most sense). I’ve got some interesting ideas for a product with that name though.

I have no doubt things are cooking in that brain of yours
You sure now your way around teasing us !

Quote from: rthrash

I’d really like to see the support organization behind it all have an international presence without question.

That’s great !

The good thing really is that the MODx team is international (maybe one of the richest in this regard) which means you’ll have the manpower at hand when needed

David thanks for providing all the great feedback!

Yes, I also remember the community being a little upset at the prospect of commercial support. Perhaps we should put out a brief survey (via surveymonkey), and ask if they are interested in this type of program before we invest a great deal of time creating and implementing this project. We could also ask them to specify what type of features they are interested in the most; what they find of value. Thoughts anyone?

I have no problem with commercial support. Personally, I’m happy to spend some of my time helping people out with small stuff, and occasionally something major that catches my fancy just for the fun of it. But my time is worth something (to me, anyway), and if I were interested in getting into the business I’d be more inclined to work with somebody on serious issues or custom coding if they’re paying for my time.

I think commercial support if fine but it will be important to make it really clear that MODx itself isn’t turning into a for-profit entity.

What usually upsets the community, in my experience, is when a product people have come to think of as free suddenly becomes a commercial product (e.g. WS_FTP). The mention of commercial support may be seen by some as a step in that direction.

Both Drupal ans Joomla have commercial support, afaik.

Quote from: MrsCommunication at Mar 28, 2008, 09:31 PM

Yes, I also remember the community being a little upset at the prospect of commercial support. Perhaps we should put out a brief survey (via surveymonkey), and ask if they are interested in this type of program before we invest a great deal of time creating and implementing this project. We could also ask them to specify what type of features they are interested in the most; what they find of value. Thoughts anyone?

What we’d like to accomplish is "productize" MODx to the point where it can support a company beyond just a few people. In my mind, MODx should become a viable niche industry, and I think it will take a company stepping up with dogged leadership in this regard to make that happen, a "Redhat of MODx" if you will. Either that, or a million-dollar plus donation so we can kick back and just focus on MODx for a few years without worrying about paying the bills. Ahem ... right!

Regardless, there’s no way we’re remotely approaching that now. If we didn’t have client work to be constantly working on you’d have seen an even more rapid and focused and dependable pace of development and updates to the site and documentation. These are the things I see the community and new users clamoring for over and over again.

The more we talk to companies adopting MODx—including those that are in development or have launched MODx sites with tens of billions of dollars (yes "B") in annual revenues—it has become more apparent having an organization behind MODx is a critically important milestone for it ever being taken seriously as a key piece of business infrastructure. Donations have not proven to be a viable way to support even one of the founders who work daily on MODx in addition to our necessary client work, two full time jobs for the last 3 or 4 years with barely any time off. We’re not complaining and donations have definitely picked up over the last few months, but in the end it’s all a moot point if we ultimate burn out. Running this project daily takes a tremendous amount of time and energy. I suspect it’s one of those things that no one really can appreciate until you’ve walked in similar shoes from inception through to where we are today.

With that said, the community is really what makes MODx so special, and our progress owes a huge debt of gratitude to it, so please don’t take this as our saying, "Gee, look what we’ve done! Aren’t we so smart/cool/whatever." Far from it: we’re constantly humbled and thankful by what individuals and organizations are doing in and with MODx.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of borrowing business models that have worked for other successful companies, hence my looking at projects like Magento and Drupal and even IBM’s Websphere operations and MySQL. My gut says our ultimate target has to be organizations that can afford the services/programs in the first place. This is why we keep coming back to targeting established developers and companies that see value in and more importantly can afford to pay perhaps thousands of dollars a year each in support and/or partner programs. Were what we’ve got in mind today available I wouldn’t even blink to pay $5000 per year.

If we can get enough similarly-minded companies on board with our vision and programs, then we can afford to pay people to work on documentation and communications full time. With the bases covered thoroughly, MODx can then become even more pervasive and friendly for the masses who might not fit the initial target demographic. Trying to serve the masses first though is probably an inevitably impossible task that would take Vegas-breaking magnitudes of good luck to survive. I for one am a terrible gambler and refuse to cheat.

Great input Ryan !

I agree with the overall strategy of focusing on realistic source of revenues (and study the success models to build on), though bringing the kind of corporate people who wouldn’t blink at giving 5000$ a year (and probably it’s a low figure for big-medium corps) means :

a) Having those corporate must-have feature we currently lack : real publication workflow, multi-language, multi-site and versionning. The way we’re headed with 0.9.7 will be a huge step up toward that. But it might take time to complete all those given the constraints you’re talking about (client’s work + developping = in the long run, as you say risk for you guys of burning out or collapsing under the strain. This is a very serious risk which should be adressed. We might need an intermediate business model for the time it takes to get those big/medium corp bucks... for instance is Hosting still in the works ?)

b) Stepping up from great/innovative opensource community app to full fledged commercially supported apps : It’s a question of being taken seriously by bigger clients and it also involves a big effort on our part to build services and a structure around MODx. We definitely try to get there but it’s hard for the same reason : client’s work takes a lot of our time and this would mean finding ways to build up revenues to support the time spent. Again, we’re slowly getting there but at some point we’ll have to boost things to cross the tipping point...

I still have to process everything you’ve written here to really offer propositions on how to achieve that, but here is my initial reaction.

Still in a bit of a fog but this thread has taken a turn from a marketing proposal to the core of the MODx project. I am not sure where to begin.

I get that MODx absolutely needs to have some appreciable revenues to make it a success but I am not sure if I completely get all your ideas, Ryan are going so I won’t touch on them other to say I’m thinking about them. I would suggest that you could increase the donations immediately through a site redesign. I don’t think that user donations are the full means to the end.

I think that outside this thread we ought to discuss some of the core values, hopes, plans and ideals for MODx to devise an operating plan with some concrete milestones, revenue goals, investor goals, etc.

Ryan, you have particular wants and desires for MODx and Jason has some but since this is not design by committee project that some longp-term business plan must be established, shared and adhered to otherwise we are managing crises and not shaping an outcome.

Regarding the partner program, I think it is premature to talk about it until the Foundation comes up with some clear financial goals with actual dollar amounts--even if they are just magic numbers until some of the other ideas work out.

I am rambling a lot and this thread is overwhelming for my foggy semi-recovered brain.

I guess the bottom line is that the marketing team should not be working without a solid business plan in place and then a marketing plan.

Ohh...my head hurts. Hopefully some of this makes sense.

Quote from: davidm at Mar 29, 2008, 10:58 AM

Great input Ryan !

I agree with the overall strategy of focusing on realistic source of revenues (and study the success models to build on), though bringing the kind of corporate people who wouldn’t blink at giving 5000$ a year (and probably it’s a low figure for big-medium corps) means :

I’m not so sure that the following are an absolute requirement, but they sure wouldn’t hurt by any means.

a) Having those corporate must-have feature we currently lack : real publication workflow, multi-language, multi-site and versionning. The way we’re headed with 0.9.7 will be a huge step up toward that.

Multi-site and multi-language should be entirely doable with 097. Versioning and publishing workflow, no. Wild guess though who would get first access to those features?

But it might take time to complete all those given the constraints you’re talking about (client’s work + developping = in the long run, as you say risk for you guys of burning out or collapsing under the strain. This is a very serious risk which should be adressed. We might need an intermediate business model for the time it takes to get those big/medium corp bucks... for instance is Hosting still in the works ?)

Hosting is still in the works, but doing it as another typical shared/virtual offering is not interesting to me. We’ll offer those things via "audited" links link http://wordpress.org/hosting/ and likely get some marginal referral fees from there. Probably will be the same set of hosts as well.

From a hosting offering, we’re thinking of making an offering on top of a set of balanced/failover servers, with a set of front-end servers in different data centers fronting a MySQL master/slave server in different data centers backing up around the clock to an S3 account; there would be no single point of failure. Also, this configuration would automatically and dynamically scale up and down in ~10 minutes in the event that a slash-dotting occurred to add resources as needed. Would this be valuable, and if so what do you think it’d be worth per domain?

b) Stepping up from great/innovative opensource community app to full fledged commercially supported apps : It’s a question of being taken seriously by bigger clients and it also involves a big effort on our part to build services and a structure around MODx. We definitely try to get there but it’s hard for the same reason : client’s work takes a lot of our time and this would mean finding ways to build up revenues to support the time spent. Again, we’re slowly getting there but at some point we’ll have to boost things to cross the tipping point...

This is precisely the reason why I think there needs to be an organization who’s mission and business it is to constantly work on the MODx core and some core extensions. My honest to goodness best guess is that it would at least be a team of 2-4 OO PHP developers, an Ajax/UI person, a support manager, 3+ support staff, an event/tradeshow/meet-up/marketing/pr person, a general production webmaster, 1-2 sysadmins, and a few others thrown in for good measure. Ambitious definitely, but that’s just my gut take on the situation.