How we got our first customers by selling an open source software

DentalCloud
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

There are many different opinions and cases in the tech world about what is more important — product or sales, especially for early-stage companies.

Some people say that if you have a good product, you can sell it very easy. Such companies usually considering success as 80% of product development and 20% for sales efforts. Other people believe that no matter how good your product is, it’s nearly impossible to sell it if you commit only 20% to sales.

In the case of the big companies, like Salesforce, they invest equally in business and product development ~50%.

We believe that concept of MVP is not working, at least for b2b software, but it might work with the consumer products

We believe that MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is not working for b2b software. You should have all the features that your competitors plus your “secret sauce” to be better than your competitors.

It took us 2,5 years of product development before we reach sustainable growth. We only had 1 full-time and 1 part-time developer.

With the consumer part of our app, that connects clinics and patients, we decided to zoom-out our focus from aesthetic dentistry to all beauty industry. Moreover, Southeast Asia is the fastest growing market of beauty services and cosmetic surgery.

Do things that don’t scale

One of the advises that also Y Combinator gives to the founders. We realized that we doing this, something fragile that we can’t scale, after the first version of the product. So our process looked like this:

Preparation:

  • Started from a problem that all clinics need more revenue.
  • Checked around 200 websites of cosmetic surgery and beauty clinics.
  • They have hundreds to thousands of visitors per day.
  • But most of the visitors are not converted into patients because they can’t contact and request prices for procedures instantly.
  • Video consultations are really helpful for the beauty industry. It’s also more convenient for patients as a first appointment.
  • So we started to experiment with a video consultation service.

Launch:

  • We picked Jitsi.org for video consultation feature and chat21.org for the chat feature. They are available for commercial use.
  • Deployed on AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform.
  • Researched and contacted managers of clinics through Facebook, not email and not through websites.
  • Launched a free pilot with 30 confirmed clinics from 85 offers. We sent an early-bird sales deck for each customer and did offline demos.

Results:

  • Reached first 100 video consultations done in 1 week.
  • 3 clinics already switched to the subscription plan.
  • 11 clinics asked us to extend the trial period.
Widget for clinics websites

Summary

  • Spent only $15 for website WordPress theme.
  • Designed logo by using online logo generator tools.
  • Free infrastructure. There are plenty of options available — Heroku, DigitalOcean, credits for Amazon and Microsoft Azure platform.
  • Of course, you need someone to set up and deploy code, but it’s possible to do it in a few days.
  • Approaching pilot customers through Facebook and make friends with them works good, at least with clinics it works better than do it offline.
  • Open source code could be a good validator for your ideas if you can solve at least 1 problem for your customer.

While we only launched a landing page for our new product CosmoTap, we already got a few customers. The next step for us — onboard next 50 customers with online consultation widget and after — launch our app completely.

Just wondering if there someone in the community who started by selling an open source software? If so, in which industry?