@scottalanmiller should be the years of doing this, but I'm not sharing this view anymore. Well, ideally yes, I would like things working like that. But never found someone else with money here agree with that.

Connecting to another hypervisor is totally possible (and even by design), but it will require time AND money (ie: hiring more people)

I have TONS of ideas, (in fact all the ideas you gave here, already got them ). But how the heck I can accomplish this without showing investors they can trust me? I can't tell them "go big or go home". I need to demonstrate the business is viable at least.

So one thing after another. Or give me one million $ ^^

@DustinB3403 There is no short answer to this question ^^

@scottalanmiller Hmm.. XenServer market is around 100k companies around the world. This IS a niche market by definition (comparing to VMWare)

We didn't start commercial stuff with XO without having some figures of the industry. Now if you have other data, I'm always eager to read them

Why only XenServer users? Because they are easy to target AND convert when you start the business (works out of the box. People won't change their hypervisors like that).

edit: I like the "think big" stuff, but as I said, that's not possible in Europe.

@scottalanmiller said:

@DustinB3403 said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@olivier said:

@scottalanmiller We are not in US here. Investors don't believe in this. And a very few succeeded by doing that.

Basically you just said that your investors don't believe in making money.

I think what he said is he wouldn't have any investors if his company wasn't making money. Or at least a model to make money.

Good investors, the big ones, make their big money by investing when a company is small and betting big. If you are investing in a company already profitable, your opportunities for big wins are small.

What he is explaining is that they really only have traditional investors there, and this is a well known European problem, they lack the venture capital ecosystem that drives the US economy.

This.

@scottalanmiller We are in a niche market. And lower cost is only possible if it's scalable. But scalable means more complex pricing, for us and for customers. There is no "trivial" way ^^

@DustinB3403 That's something already crossed my mind. But it's not that easy to do. You can't emulate a XenServer infrastructure. So we got two choices: a fake interface or a real stuff but with limited rights to avoid bad things ^^ Again, can't be everywhere, not a priority.

@coliver Full transparency in our documentation: https://xen-orchestra.com/docs/roadmap.html

edit: Forever Forward Incremental Backup is not displayed there, but it's for this month. Continuous replication too. And a first beta of our self service portal.

@coliver Grenoble, France. We found a small team of investors that "helped us" last year, but that's really small amounts of money. But despite that, our growth is not bad, and we continue to focus on great features coming soon!

@anonymous no problem, it's interesting I assume (to understand from the "other side").

In an ideal world, I would like to give XOA for free to anyone. That's just not possible.

@DustinB3403 This.

@scottalanmiller Nope. But nobody here will bet a penny on you if you don't have any income in less than 1 year. Roughly, they understand Internet as a mean to sell shoes.

@scottalanmiller We are not in US here. Investors don't believe in this. And a very few succeeded by doing that.

@anonymous Nobody will pay just for support. Except huge companies, but our prices are flat. So not scalable at ALL. You need to put value in your product. Remember: a software itself is NOT a product.

XO : a software
XOA : a product (appliance + updater + support)

The only solution is to scale prices. And even with that, we need to be bigger than we are currently.

@scottalanmiller So you need "assurances" (locks/verifications) somehow to avoid people abusing of your Free product. So you need time to develop them...

Can you develop how you imagine the ideal process?

This thread is more a business thread than a technical one now ^^ But yeah, this is the point: having people liking your product but test it first. That's also the goal of the trial version. It helped us a lot to convert people from Free to paid plans.

XOA Free is a quick way to test the product (and we even have users totally happy about it, and using it everyday for basic tasks).

We got a trial, which is relatively easy to access (about 100 new trial users per month), so it serves the purpose to make people discover without having to pay anything.

Sincerely, if a company can't afford a "Starter" plan for using a basic backup solution (without limitations!), they won't be become a paid customer anytime.

The only way to please (almost) everyone, is to have something which seems totally free, like Facebook or Google, even if it's not in reality. But this strategy can only work on huge volumes and not in our niche market.

@DustinB3403 By developing the need of a constant connection to our server to check some stuff. Something like that will pop in the next month (to allow a more flexible invoicing on XO usage for a certain kind of customers).

But that's a lot of time just to think to protect the product and not developing features. I prefer releasing cool features first ^^ And you? (talking to the whole topic )

@anonymous That's something we discussed a lot here. Limiting to a number of host or VM or whatever will need to spend some times to develop this feature. And because our working bandwidth is not infinite, we prefer to focus on XO features first.

Check the number of contributors on GitHub: we are a VERY small team ^^

@coliver Will be more critical feature after feature. When it's only for basic management as an admin, you can just use the Free XOA anyway.

Backups can be more critical, and well, that's exactly the point of Starter

Then you'll have the possibility to use it extensively with other people thanks to ACLs (VM delegation for example), thus it's more critical.

And finally, you can use it at scale, when Premium can deliver the most of its potential.

We got customers with huge need of software support (maybe you know a small entity in US, which is about flying stuff, starting with "F" and finishing by a "A", with another "A" in the middle )

Hi lads!

Remind me to create my next startup doing only SaaS software and without any public code ^^ (just kidding, I love open source ).

@anonymous : I would like to eat at the end of the month, and to do that, I need some income. My team think the same (damn it! ). We are all working on XO every day. We are not Google, we are a small company working only on XO.

So we started to target companies and sell them a turnkney solution: XOA, which is the appliance running XO + an easy updater + support on a controlled environment.

But in the same time, because we love Open Source, all XO features are also released on GitHub. That's not the same audience: companies want something working out of the box and support. Individuals are different. And we even took the time to document the installation from the sources ^^ If you don't want to pay, play with the sources

About XOA, it runs on Debian, but it should work on any Linux, even MacOS or Windows!