Building a new CMS-ish product
I have been a webdeveloper for about 20 years and have been using WordPress almost exclusively for the last 10 years.
While WordPress serves me well, it also has so much that could be improved. Because these improvements I would like to see are so fundamental to WordPress, it’s highly unlikely to ever see that in WordPress.
That’s why I have been planning on building a new CMS-ish system that has most that core WP has, but is also fundamentally better.
I know this will be one hell of a job, and the time I will spend on it, can’t be spend on clients projects. But… My gut-feeling is that it could have a lot of potential!
The first step of this journey would be the development of a MVP. Regarding the MVP, I need some advice;
- how much time is too little and too much to develop the mvp realistically? I want (alpha) users ASAP to get some feedback and expand on that…
- what would the time to market and earning some money be realistically? Could it be done in six months?
I would love to read your insights! Thanks in advance!
I already built a mini CMS to serve content. I use it exclusively for blogging and couldn't be happier. It doesn't need to be fancy; but Google absolutely loves it!
MVP:
Finally free from WP.
Cool, that is my idea to start with! Is it open source or do you want to share what you've built?
It's super tailored to suit my needs and I don't think releasing it makes sense. The best part is that I can use Tailwind's Typography with TipTap. That's all I wanted. :-)
I don't want to discourage you (too much) because you can learn an awful lot by building your own content management system. But this kind of project can quickly lead to development hell if you aren't careful.
You might think WordPress has a lot of problems, and you would be right, but 99.9999999% of people who aren't reading sites like Indie Hackers think it is just fine. Do you want to go up against that and try and convince those people to switch based on reasons they don't care about?
You can put together a basic CMS quickly but, as I mentioned, it's unlikely to be worth anyone switching to. Getting to that point, and generating real revenue, could take you years. You could slave away at this for a long time with little or no income.
If you still want to push ahead I would suggest the following:
Find a niche, get people using it as fast as possible, and don't build anything you aren't 100% certain users will need.
I'm aware of that. Before I went fully with WordPress about 10 years ago, I've worked with numerous opensource and proprietery CMS's, and built numerous CMS's. So tech-wise I have enough experience to build it.
My idea is to start small, but also build something with a different take, so it's not just another CMS. I want to focus on business owners, developers/implementors and hobbyists who want to save time building solutions. :)
Your idea is basically what I'm just finishing now at https://apexpl.io/. Software is 100%, although just finishing the docs generation dependancy today. Still need to proof read the development docs and write the training program, but took me about 6 years all in. Granted, was contracting out quite a bit during this time, but good portion of that served to only strenghen Apex and weed out bugs
Not sure what to say, but it's a long journey, and the open source community are pretty harsh upon reviewing code.
Cool!! I can't wait to try it out :D I do see it's a totally different product then what I want to build, but it has lots of technical similarities!
If the product development is too high in costs and time, then the best you could do is to create a prototype. You can do that by partnering with a designer (or hire a freelancer if you have some money to spare) so you could get a working prototype to showcase to potential customers and gather feedback about whether it's a good idea to pursue before investing much more time, effort and money.
Pretty much what I'm saying is that you need to validate your idea first before jumping high.
I will surely validate my idea first! It can save so much time before jumping in full force ;)
6 months to 2 years
2+ years
CMS is an extremely hard market, talking from experience with https://versoly.com/ which includes a CMS + website builder.
I didn’t know versoly. Looks very good, I’m impressed! 😎
Thanks had similar goals as you, I tried other website builders and felt they could be better (flexible, include code editor).
Took ages to become profitable and I was working full time for years living on savings.
I did the same thing a decade ago: Made a CMS without knowing what to expect. It was a niche CMS for a market I had connections in, and it took a month to build and another month to be profitable.
I've also spent years on CMS's that are much better and never made a penny, so ¯\(ツ)/¯