Donations

Ryan, I am in total agreement with the spirit of openness and transparency and thanks for providing your list of things that have been discussed previously:

heres my initial input if you want it

Create a private, paid professionals forum that can be accessed for a nominal fee (probably $50-100USD per year)

Would you really want to run two forums, would the free one suffer? Would it be better to have the one forum and offer premium, per incident paid support for anyone where their situation is critical on a commercial site, this may involve having to speak with /access the clients site for a resolution? (Its what Adobe, Macromedia, Microsoft do for example but at stupid rates)

Early adopter paid access to beta code similar to SMF’s forums ("Charter Members")

Maybe this could be one of the services included as part of the professional programme. This could also include the facility to hand commercial projects off to these MODx devs. I think trying to calculate a fee and track this, paperwork etc may wipe out any gains in administration however. Plus if one developer does not get any work they may compain they are paying for something they are not benefitting from. It may be easier to simply charge say $20 - $25 per month for professionals programme instead and just have a good programme?

Taking a page from the SugarCRM book and emulating a proven business model around commercial support and customization.

Sugar CRM is a great product and they are enjoying superb success from what I am told. This comes back to my previous point. Commercial customers want high quality, functionality rich and reliable software that represents superb value. Salesforce initial success came (I believe) from offering a hosted solution. Sugar CRM is simply offering more for less so its winning clients from them and its also hosted. More and more businesses want hosted software for the mobile employees. I am sure if someone could offer CRM, CMS, Accounts, Projects and Office as a complete solution (just add the functions you need) and link this through to a fantastic customer experience (Sales, service, Support, assets register etc) that could be provided via a single log-on /user interface they could make a great deal of money. Most businesses are small businesses happy to spend in hundreds rather than thousands. Of course there are plenty out there working on this model also

Overall, I think the market will move from fat clients to thin client browser based solutions when the web offers the ability to run richer applications (Web 2.0 will help).

Its important we all understand our markets fully to make a good living - I wonder for example which commercial customers will still buy a stand alone CMS solution in 5 - 10 years time, Like everyone now wants dynamic and not static website, I am sure a CMS will be integrated as standard with products like Sugar CRM which will probably also intergate / have links to business and accounting software. If you went with a "Professional Programme" maybe this could be developed to include recommended products that links have been developed for (It would only make sense to write these really nice links if many people would use / pay for them to justify the effort). But this could allow us to offer a more complete solution than competitors. I notice there are quite a number of posts on the forum where individuals recommend a particular product they have come across, not all free. But how would you sell this product to a client where an employee would have to log into three different applications with different interfaces.

Could a Modx Professional range be an extension of the free open source product with stronger paid-for commercial options and which also offered the most important key add-ons (Project management, Email marketing, eCommerce etc)? I bet there are developers out there with these industry skills who would love to get stuck in if they could fund it. It would be quite easy I think to organise developers to these projects, starting small and using the Modx development framework. For example myemma.com offer a very nice email marketing solution. Typically users will want to specify in their preferences if and how they should receive emails (one log-on issue again). If there was a Modx hosted email solution that was properly integrated and sold as a hosted solution xxx amount per email, or purchased as a one-off solution for those using there own server who would be interested. I would for sure, I could see me selling that benefit very quickly to potential customers and it strengthens the reason to choose Modx

Anyway, enough said. Whatever you decide, if its commercially driven it will need a vision of where it will be in 12, 24, 36 months. Why it will work, what advantages it provides to small business and how it overcomes their issues and extends to integrate their core applications together. If you put something together that Modx developers love now but there are few commercial orders, it would ultimately die through lack of funding. After all, its a touch world and we are all trying to address our customers business needs better and cheaper than the next guy so we get the business.

I will chip in too. I know I can’t donate a big sum of money, ever since I’m in the mid of trying to build my own company. Hope my first donation will prove my willingness to keep this project going.

Same with edge, I haven’t have any project with MODx yet, but I can see a promising future in the long run. Currently I’m an old PHP programmer, who are using ASP .Net at my workplace, and willing to start learning PHP all over again.

I’m looking forward for having MODx foundation and fund supply in place. If you want me to help in anyway with it, feel free to contact me personally.

This is the quote that I want to point out

In summary I think that no project that becomes really successful can survive without funding. So I guess my conclusion is that the main money should come from commercial projects and that by using some of this to create a proper business structure (Something that sits between free services and expensive commercial services to also help Modx developers make a fair living) may be the may to go. A commercial services presence could provide funding for example, to list approved Modx Resellers on a commercial website which itself could generate leads whilst removing the barriers to installing free open source software, that stops this commercial group taking it serious. You may even be able to fund the production of maketing material via this global commercial network such as a Modx CMS sales brochure. Why not?, if you get this right and provide territory management etc then this really is no different to Novell Linux products or Redhat’s selling methods other than small business will remain very price sensitive.

I believe that the commercial project will be the most important source of funds. Most commercial project just care about having their system in place, but most personal user will care more about how the system will evolve, and how they can contribute into the system. Thanks for pointing that out Edge.

My suggestion is having a paid support/installation for MODx, which can be achieve as what edge and Ryan mentioned in their post.

Another consideration is maybe a professional members group. These are people like myself who develop sites for a living. Maybe this group could also work together on projects so we win bigger orders, share development skills at agreed rates and offer businesses a more global service, rather than just being independent small businesses. Maybe this group could offer end-user support 24 x 7, have some members who can integrate eCommerce and other applications or offer a global hosting solution. This could involve an annual members charge, with additional costs for extra services, access to development resources etc (See below)

# a commercial projects system where projects are handed off to MODx devs, and MODx recieves a modest fee for sourcing of the projects (10%)

As far about help support, if the company have their own developer, we can provide a support ticket which MODx developer/regular member able to help answer those question. One of the drawback is the people unable to receive the right answer right away, unless if we have a moderator to collect all the answers given by MODx users, then sort them out, and compile it, to be posted as an answer to the paid user.

Anyway, there are a lot more things that can be done to support this system, without sacrificing the future development of MODx.

I’m looking forward for more discussion or open debate about this as well.


Regards,
Wendy Novianto

Anyway, I just want to say that we still have to keep the Open Source product free, and collect fund from support and etc. I believe we can come up with something more uinque and efficient in collecting funds and supporting the development of MODx. I believe paid support is great, but it’s not the only way to raise funds for MODx.

Another thing to point out, we need a better vision and mission statement. I believe this discussion will lead to a lot of misunderstanding to some other users. But I just want to point out that the community that MODx has right now is one of the thing that keeps MODx going, I believe there are a lot of other way to raise funds without affecting this community.

Sincerely,
Wendy Novianto

Thanks Wendy and edge,

You guys are great. This community is wonderful and we always plan to keep it that way!

Many thanks as well! Very interesting words.

We’re all interested in a stable and reliable team behind MODX. Together with a solid community (lets not forget those donations) a great way to go!

Away for a few days and I am missing the action !

Edge, thanks a lot for starting and fueling this thread, lots of interresting ideas coming up. I’ve been thinking along those lines too.

Like wendy and others, I am depending on open source projects to make a living : like you I intend to donate a share of what I earn (that is true of any CMS I chose to offer my clients : Textpattern, AroundMe and MODx being at the core). Right now I am struggling to make a good start for my business. Things are begining to slowly pay off. I think I will start donations in January, when I get paid for the two websites I am building right now

Aside from that, I share many of your views. You’re right saying the next stage with a wider user’s base will be a turnpoint, and managing resources will be of the essence here.

@all: Your input on the business model around MODx/Tattoo is great, thanks ! I’ll chip my twocents in later when I have more time. I am currently gathering thoughts on Marketing issues and this will help a LOT.

Hey david,

I’m interested in helping MODx with marketing issue as well. I’m looking for a way to help as much as I could. If you in the need of someone to help you research and discuss of some of the marketing strategy that MODx going to take, feel free to drop me an email. My email address is wendy (at) djamoer (dot) net, in case if you can’t find it on the profile.

I believe edge will be willing to help us more about discussing this, and we can use his personal experience in terms of selling a product that can dive into the market.

Best regards,
Wendy Novianto

Hey Wendy,

You can be sure that I am happy to provide any feedback, thoughts, help etc that benefist Modx and its members.

One of the challenges I face is that the business is already growing fast and I think I will run of out of resource’s at some point in 2006. This is where we may be able to help each other, one of us may be too busy whilst someone else has the time. Seems a shame to turn away Modx work, but like David and many others I am also standards orientated, so actually skills set is CSS, XHTML, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Modx and lots more etc, so its hard to freelance the work out to anyone, unless you know their standard. Its certainly too much for one person, and in our case there are only two of us.

Really feel there is some mileage in also looking at a few key Modx developers who make websites for a living talking and exploring creating some sort of sales channel group. It would make each of us seem bigger, could provide support when were on holidays and would ensure we could give good feedback to Modx and company regarding our thoughts on commercial business ideas. As I say there would be other benefits such as shared marketing costs

Maybe everyone needs to decide if and whn this should be discussed and is there one topic of two (One for Modx, driven by Ryan? and possibly one as a sales type channel with links via association)

I hope the discission develops

I’d be happy to entertain pretty much anything ... it’s an exciting thing to discuss.

Quote from: edge at Dec 13, 2005, 01:44 PM

Maybe everyone needs to decide if and whn this should be discussed and is there one topic of two (One for Modx, driven by Ryan? and possibly one as a sales type channel with links via association)

Sure...
So when will we start this discussion in more detailed? What’s the upcoming plan for 2006? It’s about time for new milestones and a few goals-visions to be pushed on MODx community and software.

Please invite me if there is a new interesting discussion going on for MODx. We might do some phone conference or chat conference, so that we can share idea and etc. It might be a good thing to join some Open SOurce expo and etc. It needs to be planned well guys...

Looking forward to hear back from you guys.


Sincerely,
Wendy Novianto