I want to scale Chevereto, to make it a large software development company and hire people to go beyond my single-person limitations.

I realized that I won't work without leveraging technical debt. After 2.5 years of intense learning and refactoring I came with a bunch of new concepts and applications for my software. As a result of this process, I'm sharing how do I pretend to make it happen.

This post is about the stuff I've learned in all these years of providing self-hosted software and how I pretend to monetize Chevereto for the future.

Tailored offering

👨🏾‍🏭 Each user craft their own offering tailored to specific needs.

I noticed that dual-licensing worked. To maximize it, I will split the package in multiple add-ons to increment the surface area of the Chevereto self-hosted paid offering.

In Chevereto, you pay and care for what you need. Your money goes directly to sustain the offering of what matters to you the most.

Addon store

🛍 An addon store will enable anyone to offer and sell addons to improve Chevereto.

This is similar to what envato does but without evil fees.

My idea is to drive the business for developers wanting to make a living out of Chevereto addons, to provide them with delivery and support to avoid all the hassle of having to sell that on their own.

Caring

My store will require a high-standard seeking to protect the software and to care about the consumer of these addons.

👨🏾‍⚖ I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable and I will take strict care in this regard:

• Contracts for sellers
• Expropriate abandoned addons
• Code review and quality-assurance

Memberships

🎠 Paid memberships will enable users to get perks and to contribute to sustain ongoing development.

Users will require to pay depending on the extra perks they want to get. This is an additional layer of extra goodies, which may include support assurance, RFC voting and private chat with the developers.

Perks

✨ Being honest, I'm not sure yet which perks I will enable but it should be on this tenor:

• Participate in the community
• Voting ability (RFC)
• Public recognition
• Support Tickets
• Access to all official addons (like Netflix)

Knowledge

📖 Great documentation, guides and manuals will be available to ease all the work around the software.

My goal is to drive the user towards a solution in exchange of just a little effort on their end as this causes a domino effect based on the time invested in acquiring knowledge:

• Empower the user
• Removes the fear on tech
• Encourages user to go beyond
• User saves money

For this I've updated our documentation and for the future I want to create video courses to ease the adoption of the software, to make it easier and friendly to understand.

Third-parties

🥳 All third-parties are welcome, they are also my users. I will provide services to guarantee the standard provisioning of the software for this layer of users.

A third-party is someone enabling to use of Chevereto to other users, like someone wanting to offer hosted Chevereto (SaaS).

Support

🛎️ Specialized support services will be available for those needing special services.

Self-hosted server side software could be intimidating and even with the knowledge available there will be stuff hard to understand, requiring to consult me directly. I will available to assist and consult in everything related to the software at different levels:

• Community posts
• Private chats
• Scheduled calls
• Remote assistance

Certification

🏅 To certify others will allow me to drive an ecosystem of providers for all sizes and needs.

I got this idea from CraftCMS which offers a partner program for all sizes. I will also seek to enable third-party certified support so the offering in supporting services can be more diverse than just being me the provider.

Cloud

⛅ I will offer chevereto.cloud, a hosted service where the main feature will be the software reliability, built-in support and early access to all software assets.

Wrapping up

I can't wait to start running this new business model and to start working in software for my software. It makes me happy to see that everything is taking is right place after many years.

Cheers for another decade with Chevereto!