To keep the community vibe going, one thing that’s new enough that you may not have considered it is to come back to the community and see if crowd-investing would work to get you to a point where you could be offering value add servies rather then charging for what was previously free.
I invested in Sugru when they ran their very successful campaign and it was seen very positively that they were giving not just the original backers, but the whole community that had grown around the product a chance to help it, but also get something back in the form of equity in the business rather than kickstarter style ‘perks’ Many people only invested $20 or $30 but after deciding to let more of the business be in the hands of it’s new thousands of shareholders, they raised more than triple what they needed for their global expansion unless that company becomes worth bilions, I’m never going to get rich from that investment, biut i know that a product i love is avaialable in more shops now, and every time I seee someone else buying some, there’s a little part of my brain thiniking how i just made a ten thousanth of a penny or some other tiny number, but it makes me happy, and thets what i actually invested in, a company whos reaction to needing more funds was to sell some of the businesss to their customers, and if you look at th campaign stats, for that £3,000,000 (which is abut $4.2million right now) they only sold 12ish% of the business.
I dont even have dividend rights, but i get a quarterly shareholders update to let me know what they have done and what’s on he roadmap for the next quarter. And that makes me part of something, im partly behind the scenes! It’s exciting and if i emailed a suggestion, they’d reply, one day that might happen if my area of knowledge is something hey talk about in the shareholders update. That whole experience, which will carry on until the company dies or I do which was easily worth the £30 i invested.
Would that work for you, i dont know, but (and this is my area of knowledge) it sounds like you need an additional development team, and maybe another team of fixed term contractors to be working on getting all the features you need completed in a much shorter timeframe. Then yo’d need project managers and a programme manager, and probably some community managers, a uservoice account so people can tell you whats’s important to them, and someone running the open source server community, because it looks like you have 5 contributors, which might be users, or might be your staff, but if it was promoted and managed, you could build that to tens, maybe hundreds of contributors in time, and that would be your server software sorted, because why would you need a separate version when the open source one is as good as it would be with all that in place.
As i say, this is my field, which is why it was frustrating me so much before, I don’t mind being a sounding board a bit more privately if you’d like. If you would, just add me on twitter or linkedin I’m @jamieisboss everywhere, even linkedin, I’ll send you my work email, we can chat and I’ll see if there’s anything else i can think of to help. (though to be honest, i think i just gave you the best idea going, if i was billing you, it’d be $1000 a minute for this message, payable only when and if you have 100x that invested from your community [who you should love like family; treat them at the holidays, help them make money through your services, and never take toys away from])
No worries if you dont need my offer of a sounding bard, it’s just there if you want it
Best Regards
Jamie
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