Why you might want to consider hiring a Pointy-haired Boss

First, a caveat. This advice only works if you care about money more than your coding soul. With that out of the way, let’s proceed.

You run a successful open source project. It makes you feel good. But your wife/husband/friend/household pet is pushing you to turn your project into cash. (Some human beings like cash. Actually, most do, but see the caveat above – it’s not necessarily the case that cash needs to be your primary raison d’etre in life. In fact, if it is, you’ll end up being a boring investment banker. So stick to code. 🙂

Your first instinct will be to set up an LLC or an LLP (or some variant of the two) and charge consulting fees. I know a range of developers that do this precise thing, and they’re happy.

Unfortunately, to a person, they’re not particular well-paid for what they do. Several of them get by, but not much more. The reason is the same in nearly all cases: they are great at writing code, but not particularly great at asking for money. To build a successful business, you have to be willing to ask for money. Lots of money. All the time.

Some people – including developers – do this well, but most people don’t – including developers. It’s not a natural human act, but it’s critical if you want to scale a project into something that pays not merely your mortgage but also the mortgages of many people. If you want to perform the ultimate act of charity, build your project into something that creates meaningful, lucrative work for many people.

I know several developers who have done this, and most with good results. Getting the wrong businesspeople involved in a project is death to the spirit of the project (and, ultimately, to the project itself), but getting the right people involved is manna from heaven.

How to know in advance? I don’t know, but I can tell you that people like Bob Bickel (JBoss), John Newton/John Powell (Alfresco/JLAN), Dave Rosenberg (MuleSource), Neelan Choksi (Spring/Interface21) have all been good for the projects they joined/took on. Some of the businesspeople I know have been able to turn a project’s average deal size from $1,000 – $5,000 to $50,000 – $100,000. Same code. Same project. Different cash balance.

You need to find business people with the same passion for the code that you have (though not necesssarily the same level of understanding), and someone with a background of demonstrated success building a business (which translates into “successful at asking for money”).

This sort of person is able to effectively communicate the value of the project in a way that the customers understand and appreciate. They know how much it would cost for a customer/partner to build the same thing themselves. They know what industry standards are for pricing for similar products. They understand open source and how to price/position it. And they will make you a lot more money than you will likely be able to make on your own.

Money to line your pockets, perhaps, but most open source developers I know aren’t primarily motivated by money. So think about it this way: money to feed other developers with your project. That is very cool.