I see. Well, I hope you are able to succeed at that. For what it's worth, we initially focused on consumer use but weren't able to find a path to revenue there.
Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops.
I think the problem is that the apps, while functional, weren't competitive with their SaaS competitors, and so the only reason to use the hosting service was if you really cared about the Open Source aspect. Maybe if we had a killer app that was actually better than any SaaS alternative, we could have gotten somewhere? But we never found that.
Meanwhile, we got a lot of feedback from people working at big orgs that were forced to self-host for regulatory reasons. Such orgs are terribly served by the current software market, since they can essentially only buy software from companies that specialize in building regulated software, and those companies generally build software that is expensive and terrible.
Real-time collaboration essentially didn't exist in this market, making our apps actually better than what these organizations had! But we had absolutely no expertise in selling to orgs like this, and we never really figured it out. We should have hired for it much earlier, or maybe even brought on another co-founder with enterprise sales experience.
So, we were unable to get anywhere before investors pulled the plug.
With that said, I always say you should not trust anyone's advice. Your story is different and you need to do what makes intuitive sense to you. If your intuition is right, you succeed. But you certainly can't succeed by going against your own intuition, so if someone says something that doesn't make intuitive sense to you, ignore it.
Thank you for your work on Sandstorm! I live in the highly-regulated, not-for-profit world. Sandstorm's architecture was very compelling for us. Self-hosting was a good place to start and the Capability-based Security solved a lot of problems.
I agree that the overall functionality for the apps wasn't quite up to snuff. The problem is, self-hosted apps are structurally under-resourced relative to their hosted peers. This is because SaaS providers can amortize development costs over a much bigger user base while simultaneously capturing operations efficiencies.
In my world, we want all the latest stuff, but refuse to let anyone host our data. We wind up with a small vendor pool that specializes in meeting regulatory requirements instead of making good software. I am very interested in finding technical solutions to this problem. Or at least, technical solutions that create new options to solve the operational and cultural problems!
To be fair, I think Umbrel has a very different consumer story: Since it has a much stronger crypto focus, it is targeting consumers much more likely to spend (crypto)money, I think, than the average consumer.
And a key difference is that Cloudron and Umbrel may monetize selfhosters, which I believe Sandstorm did not endeavor to do at all.
Yeah that doesn't surprise me, you pretty much have to pay them regularly if using Cloudron, even as an individual, whereas nobody hosting their own Sandstorm server ever had to pay anything. Even when Cloudron was open source, updates weren't automatic unless you subscribed.
I think personal servers is pretty key, so I'm glad there are a few endeavors working on it.
Despite a lot of noise on HN, we had only a few hundred signups for our paid hosting service. We built super-scalable hosting tech but it turned out we could have hosted them on a single big VM all along... oops.
I think the problem is that the apps, while functional, weren't competitive with their SaaS competitors, and so the only reason to use the hosting service was if you really cared about the Open Source aspect. Maybe if we had a killer app that was actually better than any SaaS alternative, we could have gotten somewhere? But we never found that.
Meanwhile, we got a lot of feedback from people working at big orgs that were forced to self-host for regulatory reasons. Such orgs are terribly served by the current software market, since they can essentially only buy software from companies that specialize in building regulated software, and those companies generally build software that is expensive and terrible.
Real-time collaboration essentially didn't exist in this market, making our apps actually better than what these organizations had! But we had absolutely no expertise in selling to orgs like this, and we never really figured it out. We should have hired for it much earlier, or maybe even brought on another co-founder with enterprise sales experience.
So, we were unable to get anywhere before investors pulled the plug.
With that said, I always say you should not trust anyone's advice. Your story is different and you need to do what makes intuitive sense to you. If your intuition is right, you succeed. But you certainly can't succeed by going against your own intuition, so if someone says something that doesn't make intuitive sense to you, ignore it.