My SaaS made revenue from day 1. After 6 months I've released offline tool. Here's why
From day 1 Django Doctor was a cloud service. It ran on AWS. It made revenue. Not a lot. But it was my first taste of a side project making any revenue at all.
Today I released offline mode so developers can install it via pip install django-doctor.
I did this because Django Doctor operates in a "trust economy": for Django Doctor to work it must download then analyze the customer's code. It's hard to build trust as a new product.
I've had a many support chats with potential customers interested in using Django Doctor, but concerned with sharing their closed trade secret source code. I tried explaining:
- my business lives or dies on trust: if I'm seen to be untrustworthy then no one will use the service, so what's in it for me to view their code?
- It's hard enough for a dev to reuse code they specifically wrote to be reusable, so someone copy and pasting your code would not be very useful for me without the rest of the accouterments and organs that make your business work.
- I linked them to a very convincing relevant quora thread.
- I even shared my LinedkIn so they can see some social credit. "look, I wear a suit" etc.
However even though interest was high, growth of paying customers was low. Rather frustrating because I was paying real money for Twitter, Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads. I was writing blog posts and spending hours creating OC to draw attention to Django Doctor. I was yelled at by Reddit. Then the potential customer gets to the point they want to use Django Doctor and...boom they don't trust the SaaS model with an unknown company.
So I bit the bullet and juggled making an offline version of Django Doctor with caring for our 1 month old baby. I had good source code on my side: I use React on the frontend and the components were very reusable, and on the backend my code was very well tested so I was able to refactor with low stress that I broke something.
But now the tables have turned. I'm sharing my source code with users. I'm publishing the source code of Django Doctor to pypi. Fortunately my point above about "accouterments and organs" should be valid here too...however I used cython to compile parts of the code to C for speed boost purposes, and a nice side-effect is the C code cannot be turned back into python.
And the results? After 12 hours I have 2 new paying customers. Good early signs of growth.
