On Jan 18, 2010, at 8:45 PM, Ruth Hoffman wrote: > Why David - thanks for the endorsement! Competition is always a good thing > and I welcome it as it makes me better. Let me just say, however, the ramp up > time associated with OFBiz is nothing compared to writing and > self-publishing. It's not as easy as it looks. And it is expensive. You can't > just toss together a computer w/Linux and Java (all freebies) and hope to > assemble something useful. > > And, it doesn't pay nearly as well as consulting.
This is just my opinion, but I think that if you wanted to make money on proper documentation (which is probably more than a 10,000 hour effort as a rough guess) you'd have to do it along with a supported commercial distribution and a good marketing budget. In other words, if your target market size is that of whatever the OFBiz open source project (with a marketing budget of zero, conveniently the same in any currency), then your target market is pretty small. If you tried to spend on marketing for just documentation you'd have a limit of whatever OFBiz draws, or you'd have to spend enough to lift OFBiz along with your product which brings me back to the idea of doing a supported distribution in addition to marketing because the revenue potential for documentation alone is probably not adequate for that level of marketing spend, and you would also be putting capital into marketing for something you don't control. > Looking for new ventures are you? How about just invest in what I'm doing? If > there is anyone out there who would like to invest in my efforts, I'm all > ears! I could use a new server, some first-class editorial help, a > professional indexer, professional quality publication software (something > like InDesign) etc., etc., etc. I'm sorry if I made the wrong impression, when I wrote "It would be interesting to see" that's what I meant, putting me in the position of an outside observer. Not only am I not in a position to invest, I'm not even in a position to participate in a startup unless it is already well funded. I'm just a working man. Actually, it's worse than that... I'm just a failed entrepreneur with more liabilities than assets and in this labour market with growing supply and flat-lined demand I'm back to making what I did 8 years ago when OFBiz was a year old and little more than a very basic framework plus a hacked together, primitive, ecommerce package. I'd like to think I've learned some lessons in all of this. One is that the old saying about love does not apply at ALL to investing, and it is not better to have invested and lost than to never have invested at all. In fact, I think investing is all about timing, and I've blown it altogether. If you're starting with nothing then you never want to invest immediately should you manage to earn more than you need to live. Work like mad to make a lot of money when markets are up, but for goodness sake don't invest it then! Hoard it and wait for the market to fall apart, THEN start investing in whatever you're going to, be it people and training for a services business, assets with the hope of appreciation, intellectual property of any sort (documentation, software, whatever), or anything else. Yes, timing this well is all but impossible, but it's not like you have to cut it close. You just keep the money when you earn, and invest it when you can't so much earn any more (especially if you know others are also having trouble earning and are willing to work for peanuts to survive :) ). As for consulting, it's enough to survive if you're lucky, but certainly not comfortable or secure, especially these days when the labour market is not exactly favourable. Having tried at the documentation market, I'm guess that isn't all that great either. I won't say much more about consulting though, chances are I have clients or prospective clients reading in. Since clients are probably reading in I should probably get back to work... ;) -David
