I have a situation here. I have a potential client who is looking for an accounting+HR+project solution. Basically, all the client is looking for is available in ERPN. My questions are as follows, please answer them accordingly
Initially, I wanted to offer them the self-hosted ERPN, so I can charge them with my own terms. But, ERPN cannot be customized with my own branding or fully white-label, right?
If I refer them to ERPN cloud solution, what will I get? I am not an ERPN partner, not even an individual partner. ERPN does not have a reseller or affiliate program, why should I refer the client to ERPN?
Anyone here had an experience like me who selling ERPN solutions to your clients? Please share, how you do it? What important things that I should do If I want to do the same?
ERPNext is 100% open source. You can do nearly anything you want. Including rebranding and white-labeling. The only thing you cannot do is infringe or abuse the trademarks owned by Frappe.
However. White-labelling is generally frowned on by the ERPNext community. If you go down that path, I expect few people will help you. Don’t be surprised if you get a cold reception.
I personally think white-labeling is a bad move, both for businesses and customers.
Check out the info already shared by Obinna and Rushabh. If you want more details, I recommend contacting the provider directly in a private conversation.
Entire books could be written on this question. (and probably have been)
Are you asking how to sell it? Or are you asking how to be a Service Provider? Because those are 2 very different questions, with very different answers.
Host on your own servers. Sell as a service to your clients. The upside to them being that they don’t have to buy hardware, retain dedicated IT staff to guaranty uptime
Try and avoid over-customisations.
Invest more in understanding your customer’s processes and helping them standardize.
Sell support & hosting rather than implementation. The analogy we use with our clients is to think of it as an insurance premium they pay to protect against risk to business continuity that any downtime to their ERP instance will cause.
Provide value additions in neat add-ons that ERPNext doesn’t provide
…
Great points, but remember that hosting is hard. There are lots of moving parts, security considerations and you need to be reasonably familiar to Linux (setting up is easy, incidents are hard)
Want to pitch working with Frappe for hosting (we do self hosted support too) as we have full stack experience.
Also the money goes back into the product, unlike if you pay AWS who won’t contribute
As a code of honour and protecting the freedom of your customers, make your addons open source and share with the community!
So @rmehta, what is the answer of my question for this thread?
Because I am not a partner for ERPN, and I cant afford to be one, better I just let this opportunity slips away? Since if i refer the client to ERPN, I will not get a cent. Right?
If there at least an affiliate program with recurring commission, I can proceed refer them to ERPN to sign up, but unfortunately no.
True. But no one ever made money by doing the easy things
Last time I engaged on this, there didn’t seem to be flexibility in the pricing of the self-hosted offering and I never got a response back to my suggestions.
The are other ways of money getting into the product
Yes. Where it’s reasonable to do so. At the very least, the customer should always have access to their code. In many cases though, the solutions are very specific to the customer and even they may not want it shared. Also, the slow adoption of PRs can serve as a demotivation when considering sharing since the priority is usually to get the customer up and running.
If you cannot handle them yourself → Do you still strongly believe that ERPNext is a great solution for them? If yes, then refer them to your favorite consultant/firm that you respect.
It’s great to receive referral bonuses. And in a perfect world, we all would. But if that’s not an option, just send prospects to people you respect. They’ll appreciate the business. And even if they cannot pay you a referral fee today, they’ll remember you in the future.
Indeed, solutions are quite-often specific to customers. Document your code. Share your code with them. Take backups. Warn customers about how customization slows down upgrades. And then help them upgrade later, when its time.
In the future (if possible and practical) remove the custom code/apps and revert to the latest standard functionality…
But sometimes you cannot. And that’s okay.
Submit a PR if it makes sense, if you can, and if it fits the product as a whole. Hope that someone sees it. Hope they send you some kind of feedback.
But if that doesn’t happen, move forward.
You cannot fix everything and everyone. So don’t let anyone stop you & your customers from improving, solving problems, and being better together. Not every action we take requires some kind of community-wide acceptance on Microsoft’s GitHub platform.
Yet if you still want to be open and helpful, there are plenty of other ways. You can write articles and blog about your solutions. You can point people to your own git repositories and branches, even if they’re not part of the official repo. You can help answer questions to fellow enthusiasts. You can connect with people online, at meetups, over email or phone. Publish a video online. Start a community, create some forums or chat channels. Share documentation.
Or don’t. You’re under no obligation to share every bit of knowledge in your brain, and publish your entire professional life into the public domain.
But please respect the product’s licensing and trademarks.
Since i am not a partner to ERPN and not afford to be one, anyone with ERPN customisation and implementation skills want to team up/JV with me? I have clients waiting.
