How much revenue can an unknown open source project bring——
Three year summary and sharing of NocoBase
origin
In 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic began to spread. At that time, I was running three different companies at the same time. Except for the sports event platform, which was closed due to the epidemic, the other two companies were not affected and their revenue and profits continued to increase. But I can't go away for several months, nor can I meet friends and customers casually, which makes me very depressed.
One day, I told my wife that I don't want to lose touch with the world. I hope to hear new stories every day. I will start to make a product that will excite me for a long time.
So I immediately contacted Chenlin. He was in charge of the development of the sports event platform in another team of ours. In fact, we have been talking about this product intermittently since 2018. After several weeks of collision, we determined the target scene, design principles, product form, technical architecture and other key factors. I brought a colleague from another team, and the initial team was formed.
It was not until a few months later that we determined the final name of this product from several alternative names: NocoBase 。 It is a codeless development platform for developers, and it is the infrastructure of the development team. Its design principle is that 80% of the requirements are realized through no code, and the other 20% are realized through extension development. It is designed as a micro kernel, plug-in architecture, and all functions are extended in the form of plug-ins.
At the same time, we also identified three things:
- Open Source 。 The code of this product will be open source. Only open source and openness can maximize its scalability advantages. Moreover, open source will help us reach users around the world without investing too much resources in marketing and sales.
- 6 years 。 Don't judge the correctness of this matter too early, at least do it for 6 years before making a conclusion. In the first two years, MVP was made to express our core ideas; In the second two years, the product will be put into practical use in the production environment and continuously verified and improved; In the third two years, we will introduce our products to more enterprises and invest in the construction of open source communities. We will gradually expand the team according to the income and expenditure situation to balance the development speed and risks.
- 20% 。 Once we start to make profits, we will allocate 20% of the annual profits (which has now increased to 30%) to the core team. The core team is working together to create a career and create a work that makes them proud, rather than engaging in an ordinary job. So it began.
present situation
From the first code submission in GitHub and Gitee on March 29, 2021 to now, our second two-year plan is in progress.
In the past three years, we have made a few posts about NocoBase in Reddit, Dev, V2ex, Oschina and other communities. In addition, we have not done more publicity and promotion activities. The reason is that NocoBase, as an enterprise product and as an infrastructure, is far from perfect. At the beginning of the document home page and GitHub Readme, we emphasize that NocoBase is in the early development stage, so please be careful to use it in the production environment.
In addition, users from many countries have introduced NocoBase in their blogs and social media, bringing many new users to NocoBase. Dozens of contributors have contributed code to NocoBase. I would like to express my gratitude to you.
Here are some of our current data. From these data, it can be seen that as an open source project, NocoBase is not known and used by many people. It is still an unknown project.
| Item |
data |
| GitHub Star |
5.7k |
| Gitee Star |
1.8k |
| Contributors |
fifty-seven |
| Google results |
11.2k |
| Npm package downloads |
37k |
| Docker image pulls |
50k |
| Git cloners |
50/day |
To celebrate, two weeks ago, on the last day of April, we upgraded the root version number from 0 to 1, and officially released the 1.0 alpha version. At the same time, the official account of NocoBase has been opened on various social platforms. We began to prepare to introduce NocoBase to more people, and we are also ready to start our commercialization journey.
Income in the past 12 months
Although we have just released 1.0 alpha and have not publicly provided standard commercial licenses and commercial plug-ins, we will receive the first large amount of revenue in October 2022. In the past 12 months (from May 2023 to April 2024), our revenue totaled 2.26 million yuan (all foreign currencies were converted into RMB).
These revenues mainly come from:
- China
- U.S.A
- India
- Europe
- Brazil
The types of income mainly include:
- User payment allows us to prioritize the development of required plug-ins (non customized)
- Business License
- Commercial plug-in
- Income sharing of derivatives
For a product that has been produced for 3 years, the income is ordinary. But this exceeded our expectations.
More important gains
Two months ago, when I was driving on the highway, Todd contacted me. So I stopped at the roadside, and we chatted for more than an hour. After that, it was evening. I continued on the road, looking at the red hot sunset in the rearview mirror, I felt more and more excited, as if I was beating the pulse with the whole world.
Todd's company is called PLAUD Their product is called PLAUD NOTE, which is a recording pen driven by ChatGPT. At that time, they had just completed the crowdfunding of millions of dollars. Today, a few months later, their sales have exceeded 10 million dollars. They have a strong professional technical team to research and develop the world's best products, but they do not have much energy to invest in the research and development of business support systems, resulting in the work efficiency of the market, after-sales and other teams far behind the pace of business growth.
After reading the product introduction of PLAUD NOTE, I thought it was too cool, and the team behind it was also very cool. I couldn't help introducing it to many friends around me. Todd's team thinks that NocoBase is also cool, and we hit it off. Their development team developed a business support system based on NocoBase in a few days, greatly improving the team's work efficiency.
In this process, the NocoBase team seems to have personally participated in the rapid growth of PLAUD.
Ke has been active in the NocoBase open source community since two years ago and has become a contributor. He worked in Sinopec No.5 Construction Co., Ltd., which was the first large-scale construction enterprise engaged in petrochemical construction in China, and also the first information and digital construction unit of petrochemical engineering system. Like many traditional industries, software development companies do not understand their industry, and there is a lack of professional developers in their industry.
NocoBase has brought great changes to their development model. They got through to the original database and accessed many hardware devices. Business experts explored the digital transformation of the entire industry step by step based on NocoBase's WYSIWYG codeless development method.
In our daily communication with Ke, we learned about the Saudi project, the Kuwait project, and the stories we never imagined. We have to lament that China's building capacity is very admirable and proud.
800 years, 8000 kilometers, can you imagine that in an early morning, opening the mailbox, you can talk and cooperate with another person so far away like an old friend across time and space?
Founded in 1240, Siena University is one of the oldest academic institutions in the world. It is located in the center of a medieval town in Tuscany, Italy, and has a long academic and innovative history. The last time I was so close to Italy and 1240 years ago, I learned the story of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance in my history textbook when I was in middle school. Today, in this university 8000 kilometers away and founded 800 years ago, there is a team composed of technical experts, training experts and e-learning support departments. They are using NocoBase as their infrastructure to integrate a wide range of huge processes from the administrative system to the online education system to the work order system.
The legend did not stop. Just yesterday, Fabrizio in this team sent me a message about Wenzhou University and Siena University News of mutual visits and cooperation 。 8000km becomes very close because Wenzhou University is right beside us. Fabrizio told me that this building in the news photos is where his office is located.
We have never made such cool hardware products as PLAUD NOTE, never been exposed to petrochemical construction, and never even been to Italy. Without NocoBase, they may never appear in our vision and life.
But now we have. We made NocoBase, which was discovered by some people in the world. These people are seriously using digital technology to improve their lives, improve their jobs, and even improve the entire industry. In their journey to seriously improve the world, NocoBase has become their right-hand man.
For us, NocoBase has become our connector with the world. It connects things we haven't done, people we haven't seen, places we haven't visited. Our life radius is no longer a few kilometers, and our work scope is no longer a few lines of code. Every day we can enter into a new story.
How can money measure such returns?
How we did it
1. Find the right direction
Finding the right direction may be the first topic in all entrepreneurship courses. The mainstream view is to find user pain points and calculate market size.
I have different ideas about this topic. In the past few years, I have run and invested in several companies myself. Some of them have closed down, and some are still developing steadily and creating profits continuously. When I evaluate product opportunities like NocoBase, the first thing I focus on is not user demand, nor market size. I want to pay more attention to whether it is suitable for me. I have the deepest understanding of my personality, know what I want, what I am good at, and what I am not suitable for. When I decided to make NocoBase, I focused on the following issues:
- Will it replenish my mental energy instead of consuming my energy
- Is it worth investing for more than ten years, and the longer the time, the more accumulated
- Does it have a subdivided path that few people choose
- Whether it can create profits without relying on financing
- Whether it is a standardized product that generates revenue through authorization rather than project implementation
When these questions are answered in the affirmative, we begin.
2. Lower expectations and let nature take its course
Almost all entrepreneurship tutorials will emphasize the importance of growth, even exponential growth. I admire those enterprises that can grow rapidly. But we can't do such a thing. On the one hand, we have limited ability. On the other hand, we don't want ourselves and the team to be led by numbers. I hope that what we do will have a positive impact on a stable life, rather than trying our best to chase numbers.
Therefore, we have set very low expectations from the beginning, and will not pay too much attention to the growth rate, nor set revenue targets.
3. Insufficient acceptance and long-term investment
There are no dropouts from the world's top universities or star entrepreneurs surrounded by the media halo in our team. All of us are ordinary people with stable emotions, strong sense of responsibility, good education and rich experience. In the process of developing NocoBase, we often encounter problems that are difficult to solve, and often spend more time than expected. We often find that NocoBase is difficult to use somewhere. It took us three years to upgrade the version number to 1.0, and it is still 1.0 alpha. We accept these situations frankly and do not worry about them.
In the past 1000 days, we have new Commits almost every day, and NocoBase every day is better than the previous day.
4. Grasp the rhythm and control risks
We do not finance and need healthy profits to ensure normal development. Profit=income - expenditure, so we should control the expenditure not to be too much more than the income in the early stage, and realize that the income is greater than the expenditure as soon as possible.
On the first day of construction, the worst plan we made was to have no income for six years. I prepared the funds for six years to ensure that we could survive in extreme circumstances, so that we could create products without worrying about unemployment.
For a team like NocoBase, the main expense is salary, so we started with three people and lasted for more than 10 months to control the monthly cost at tens of thousands of yuan. When it is closer to generating income, the team size is gradually expanded, and only recently has it increased to 10 people.
In fact, we have now achieved profitability, and the income structure is becoming healthier and healthier.
5. The ideal of work is for the ideal life
NocoBase is a remote work team. People live in different cities and have different living habits. We have a regular weekly meeting every week, and there are no other constraints. No workload statistics, no working hour records, no need to ask for leave. Everyone is responsible for some aspect, and everyone is responsible for the results.
As mentioned at the beginning, we distribute 30% of the profits to the core team every year. Everyone is responsible for NocoBase, which is actually responsible for their own business.
When I wrote this paragraph, everyone was preparing for the team reunion and vacation in two weeks.
6. Help users succeed
We don't have a sales team, which should not happen for a long time in the future. We hope to attract users through the product itself, establish connections with users, and then help users achieve their goals through the product. We do not sell commercial licenses to users. We recommend that users use open source licenses as far as possible to achieve their goals, or at least go through several months of actual testing in their own business scenarios. NocoBase actually helps users make more money or reduce more costs, which is the basis for users to pay us.
What to do next
In fact, we don't have a very detailed timetable or growth plan. But at least we can be sure that our six-year plan is just over half. In the next 1000 days, we will still have Commits almost every day, and the NocoBase of each day will still be better than the previous day.
Of course, we are also looking forward to connecting to more wonderful stories and dancing closely with them. If your company is using or preparing to try NocoBase, or you are interested in participating in the development of NocoBase, welcome to contact us Get in touch 。
