“The Hockey Stick bet
“Venture Capitalists demand the “hockey stick” – so a
significant growth in revenue after the initial investing (low
growth) phase. My business model ensured a sure and steady growth
by signing up partners and getting them as productive as possible.
So the search began.“The first action was to increase the prices slightly, which
only increased the number of partners to join Adempiere. That was
not a loss, as they did not report their installations. The total
revenue increased due to higher number of customers and slightly
bigger deals.“The popular idea at that time was a professional (fee based)
version in addition to the free product. I was not too enthusiastic
about it – in order to promote your fee based product, you
have to degrade the base product touting the difference as
enterprise functionality. It also creates conflicts with the open
source community. The emphasis of the company is on the
professional version”