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Since I started to work at TotalCross I realized that selling a framework to developers would be one of the most difficult and exciting things I had ever done in my professional life. We had a validated product with clients worldwide (including one which has used our framework to build a bomb detection App for the US Government) and we had an experienced tech team to keep improving our product.
So, we decided to create an outbound marketing team because it seemed to be the best strategy to increase our sales and to reach the desirable exponential growth. We followed the “Predictable Revenue” book method, building a selling machine with 4 steps: lead research, prospecting, lead validation and closing. Six months later we could tell our process reached a high level of performance, except for one step: closing.
We used to have dozens of meetings with developers really excited with our technology. They could see how it would help them in their daily work, delivering Apps for all operating systems in a fast and easy way. But They definitely were not willing to buy it. We thought we were not reaching the ICP (Ideal Client Profile) and we started validating all kinds of markets: IT consulting, consumer goods, insurance, agriculture, food and beverages industry, etc. We never found our ICP. But was finding the ICP the real problem?
Once I went to an event and heard someone saying:
“If something is pretty hard to do, maybe you are doing it wrong”
That made sense to me. Shortly after we started researching, we held meetings and workshops to figure out what we were doing wrong.
It was a tough time, but rewarding as well. If on one side we were living an uncertain period with anxiety and lots of unanswered questions, on the flip side we had many reasons to enjoy it. Once we were not only looking for a new business model, but also creating a new selling point, we needed to bring new minds. So we started to make new connexions, going to events and meeting lots of special people.
In Brazil we have met people from the embedded systems world, like Toradex global team and Raul Rosseto from Foundries, who showed us how TotalCross could fit into this market.
At FOSDEM (the best free and open source software conference in Europe) we have met guys from the open source world , like Gabriel Engel (Rocket.Chat CEO), Jon “maddog” Hall (Chairman of the Board of Linux Professional Institute) and Cédrid Thomas (OW2 CEO), who taught us how open source business works.
All of them helped us a lot by bringing new perspectives from the software development tools market. They also led us to three main conclusions:
First, you must only charge what people are willing to pay and developers do not want to pay usage fees (i.e. developer seat subscription). If you charge developers to use your framework, they will remain your clients only until an open source alternative appears.
Second, if you are not a huge corporation it is almost impossible to maintain and improve a complex technology quickly by yourself. In our case, TotalCross has more than 700,000 lines of code, most of that in C programming language.
Third, defining a product roadmap is crucial and it is really hard to get right. When you have thousands of people using and contributing to your product, it becomes much easier.
When we started to talk about becoming open source it seemed a daring and huge step. But taking these three points under consideration, the decision was not as hard as we thought, we started seeing it as common sense and the right way to succeed. Our product adds value to developers, being open source brings their willingness to contribute to its improvement and to build together the best roadmap possible.
Since March 2020 TotalCross is a free and open source SDK (Software Development Kit). People from all over the world help us with our source code, product roadmap, revenue model and so on.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
I know it is cliché, but it remains truer than ever.
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