Hi Dave, great post!

The one point that your company may have trouble with is keeping costs down as you grow.

You're correct to suggest "keep keeping costs down" as a key tip. It makes total sense while you're growing. But I think you may find it challenging to keep your sales and marketing costs low as your company grows to compete with commercial products. I looked at what Red Hat was spending on SG&A and compared it to commercial vendors and found that it's about the same. And when you compare what % of Red Hat’s total revenue is spent on SG&A (i.e. 54%), it's almost 2x the similar figures from traditional vendors. I used Red Hat as a proxy for Open Source vendors as they’re really the only ones who have public financials ;-)

So, the moral of the story is, like you said, keep costs down. Being an open-source based company won't magically alter your cost structure in the long run....unless you work at it.

Cheers,

Savio