Ask HN: Productising Frameworks

1 points by kierenj 2 years ago | 1 comment

Over the years as a software consultancy, we've built frameworks, templates, conventions and tools for development that have solved many of the issues and inefficiencies that we had. It made it easy for us to keep consistencies of approach and a rich feature set across projects.

For context, they're modules/packages built on top of .NET Core and React, add some patterns, functions and tools we've found useful, and basically make things more opinionated.

Obviously this IP has value to us internally. We have some samples, templates, documentation.

I'm considering seeing if there's a way to share this with the wider world. I'm also wondering if there's a way to productise the thing - it'd be great to be able to pour more engineering time into them to complete the vision, but in terms of day-to-day "bread and butter", our consultancy projects are what pay the bills and demand more time.

Obviously these frameworks are built 'on the shoulders of giants', and we benefit a great deal from the open source ecosystem. We have also spent many tens or hundreds of days of research, design and development work. But I would also guess that the majority of developers would only really look to open source frameworks, for a number of important reasons.

I was wondering if anyone had words of wisdom, or experiences, about the path of productisation. Some thoughts I've had include:

- Open-source, but with a license for commerical use (depending largely on good will) - Provide compiled/minimised code, require license keys - Build the frameworks into an online dev environment product, with SaaS pricing approach: web-based/remote VS Code experience with nice integrated features for creating FE/BE, hosting resources, monitoring, etc - FOSS, but paid support plan(s)

My gut feeling is that, in terms of deriving more value from these frameworks (or an income), it's going to be difficult and a limited market. That our best bet may be MIT licensing the lot, and feeling warm and fuzzy about doing so for the Greater Good.

Just looking for thoughts and opinions!

tikkun 2 years ago |

Here's one option:

Right now you sell services.

First, try and sell productized services - take the most standardized problems you solve, where you've built things to solve them easily and can do so with minimal manual work, and package those up into productized services for companies. Try and sell those as an option when you work with companies.

If you can sell the productized services successfully, then explore selling them as a standalone product.

If you can't sell the productized services, it's unlikely you'd be able to sell them as a product, so then in that case give them away with a permissive commercial OK license and make sure that people who use them know that they can hire your firm for official support, at premium rates.