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Last Updated 2008-11-16 by Joe Audette

Economic Drivers

I began the mojoPortal project in my free time in the summer of 2004. In the fall of 2006 I decided to take a leap and start my own business, Source Tree Solutions, LLC. My primary goal in starting my own business is and was to find a way that I could work on improving mojoPortal full time. In my first year of business I focused on consulting projects but was very selective about which projects I would take on because I prefer to work on projects that actually improved mojoPortal for everyone, not just projects to solve specific customer needs, usually the projects I took on were a mixture of both. I've also had a few customers who sponsored significant features in mojoPortal and all of it was directly beneficial to the project.

I've also had to be careful not to take on projects doing "work for hire" (meaning that the customer owns the resulting source code and I do not). Given the similarity of my code across projects I cannot take the risk of getting into a situation where someone sues me for copyright infringement over code I may have written for them that is similar to existing or future code I've written for mojoPortal. In the corporate world pretty much every .NET developer keeps a copy of any code he has written and if he needs to do something similar in a future project he copies some code from previous work. Though some of these corporate developers may be under contracts where their employer owns the code they write, working in a closed environment means your next employer is never going to see your previous work and your current employer is never going to see the work you do for your future employer. So unless you're taking code that is the secret sauce of the business and giving it to your next employer or competing against your former employer with it, there isn't a lot of risk for corporate developers who may write or copy the same code from one project to the next.

Having embarked upon the world of open source development, its much different for me, I know everyone can see my code past and future. All it would really take to get into trouble is one disgruntled customer who can point to 10 lines of code in mojoPortal that is similar to 10 lines I wrote under a "contract for hire". They could sue me and even if I'm able to defend myself its going to cost money. So, I don't do "work for hire", you can hire me but you cannot own the copyright to any code I produce. When I explain this to potential customers it often spoils the deal.

In 2008 I decided a better strategy to make revenue in order to be able to continue working on mojoPortal full time would be to sell some add on features.  If I can get a sustaining revenue stream from product sales it will give me much more freedom to choose what to work on than a consulting based business will. Consulting will remain a part of my business model in the long run, but currently I'm passing over most consulting inquiries and focusing on product development. I completed 2 products and also completed enough work in the mojoPortal WebStore feature to be able to sell them here on this site. (btw, the WebStore feature is free and open source not a paid add on product). So far sales are just a minor trickle, only a few units per month and I am living primarily on savings. I can go about another year on savings so the fundamental goal I have is to build a sustaining revenue stream before my savings runs out. To grow revenue I need to grow the popularity of mojoPortal since only users of mojoPortal are potential customers for my add on products. Only some very small percent of customers who use the free mojoPortal will buy the add on products, so my best chance for success is to drive the popularity of mojoPortal. I also need to keep improving my existing add on products and produce a few more compelling add on products, but I think growing the popularity of mojoPortal is going to be the most important thing I can do to attain success.

Below I have set out a lot of ambitious goals that I think will be the most important improvements to build on mojoPortal's growing popularity. These are the things I will be working on and trying to complete as quickly as possible. In addition to the things listed below there are many other things I would like to work on. I stated these economic drivers here so you can understand what is driving my choice of things to work on. Once I achieve a sustainable revenue model economic factors will have less influence on what I choose to work on. I will be more free to choose things to work on or respond to feature requests from the community and I will also be in a better position to coordinate the efforts of others who wish to contribute development effort to the project.

Near Term Project Goals: