What should I do with that personal saas project?
Hi guys, I have been working on a graph-oriented database service to ease the development of various projects (both personal and for a startup).
Over the time and to fulfil the requirements of the projects it was powering, it became reliable, fast (with AWS DynamoDB), natively scalable (serverless) and can track costs per query.
There is a lot of competition in the graph database market, yet I believe my solution is simpler/cheaper to use thus better fits some project requirements.
I am wondering what to do now with this project. Open source it/animate a community? Build a startup around it/test its traction on the market/find a partner? Other?
Note that I am neither a sales guy nor a github guru, so no option seems easier to me.
Any advices?
To prevent yourself from ever having to doubt whether you should have done X, Y or Z, from your list of options I suggest going for open sourcing it. My experience learned that it is the easiest (not easy, but easiest) way to validate your idea and build a potential community around it. Without the hassle of legal paper work, SLAs you'll be able to validate your product. And then if it does take off: there is still plenty of ways to turn it into a business. You can provide consulting services, host the product, etc. If you start off with the commercial approach, you will need someone that is more sales oriented and be more bought into your own idea than that you seem today.
Thanks for your feedback. I'll definitely dig more into that direction which indeed is less time consuming and less risky.
I'll soon set up a landing page to introduce the service.