I’ve been able to leverage VMware’s products in a novel way to create an on-premise VDI solution at a fraction of the cost of traditional systems, bringing total cost of ownership down by 90% or more which makes it not only price competetive to the point where it is the obviously superior option to all other compute solutions for small/medium business but even means it’s an attractive option for multi-user home environments.
This doesn’t just mean every small/medium sized office environment has now become a sales opportunity, if brought to full maturation and marketed cleverly it’d mean every small/medium office would be a guaranteed sale.
While this started out as a fun side project I’ve since realized its enormous potential but I have no contacts in the industry so don’t know where to even start marketing myself.
Do a bit of quick back of the envelope math on how much runway you’re able to fund yourself from your savings. Recommend you take your current yearly salary or income and multiply by 2 + average yearly salary of someone in the industry multiply by 2 (tax consultants + lawyers + business services) + hardware.
Once you can demonstrate you can scale your business, and your approach is really novel, you’ll have no trouble getting VC backing, e.g. after a year or so (your customer base will give VC an obvious exit - sale to any of the cloud companies). But in the meantime the venture is all on you.
Assuming there’s enough value in what you’ve been able to do, you should figure out how to setup a company (LLP/LLC/LTD depending on your country - something where you’re not liable for your own burnout) and switch as much of what you’re doing to be accounted to company. You’ll need to read some legal stuff and some tax law - that’ll take time, it’s worth reading before your sign over your car and start charging food deliveries to your company credit card.
How you get to your first several customers - and more customers beyond:
Packaging your offering (into a product, once off or subscription based or combination).
Putting together a website where you describe your offering
Marketing - word of mouth as well as reaching out to companies who already do business with the audience you’re targeting - typically folks who’s already doing lots of contract sysadmin or contract network work with small businesses. You can look for folks who you think might be hire-able by your audience. Again, if your proposal has value, they should have no issues vouching for your product with their existing customers, as long as it’s not a competition to them, and you get your customer base.
At some point you’ll need to hire more people for various reasons - for one there’s no chance your mental health won’t suffer dealing both with the business side of things as well as the product side for longer than a year.
All of this requires you spending time reading docs about companies and researching various contract templates and so on.
So:
A bit of basic math (how much will this cost you and how long can you live off of your savings and how long can you keep covering business expenses before you get paid).
Come up with a service/pricing/product model
Go to market, bootstrap through existing companies.
I’d be worried that if VMware caught on to it and were not happy about providing such a service through their product at such a cost reduction, they may change their TOS/ELUA or even change some functionality that could render your solution obsolete.
If you are unwilling or unable to protect your “novel” idea with a patent, then the nanosecond you launch someone with deeper pockets will knock off your idea and have a superior product in the marketplace within a week.
Rather than take this to market yourself, I suggest you spend a month building and rehearsing a 5-minute presentation, then fly to VMware’s headquarters and pitch it to the head of Marketing. Angle to be put on payroll as project lead.
A publicly visible website with your product offered as a commercial service, coupled with protection via patent and/or copyright laws, are the only things that will prevent VMware (or some other company) from just outright stealing your idea and calling it their own. You can’t stop them from stealing it. You just want to make sure you can win the 5-year lawsuit that you would have to fight if they did.
I doubt you have deep enough pockets to prosecute an overseas company that violates your patent… and that is a very real possibility you should consider before doing anything else.
I’ve been getting some very helpful responses so far and I’d like to begin by expressing my gratitude.
You and whizdumb point to the two main challenges I’d be facing if I were to launch myself into the deep end of the pool and attempt to package my solution under my own brand name. Not only would established SI’s go cross eyed and fracture their fingers from typing up their own patents and going ahead in a mad rush to capture their share of a virgin market possibly (probably) valued in the billions but VMware, Nvidia, AMD, Intel or Microsoft could just as easy pull the plug on the whole thing the moment they realize what I’ve done turns most of their market segmentation strategies on their head.
I’ve been very diligent in reading through licensing agreements from all the software/hardware manufacturers whose products I make use of. I am in complete compliance with all but it’s also obvious none of them have even imagined a use case like mine could emerge.
Because we don’t know how your solution works, could it be platform agnostic or would it absolutely require VMware? If this can be something used on top of multiple virtualization platforms then you might have a viable product. But once again, I’d worry about trying to tie something into one company’s product.
There’s always the “go for glory” route… Instead of trying to make money directly from the idea, release the whole thing into the Public Domain. That prevents any possibility that the idea can be absorbed and then buried, forever granting its benefits to the world, and you might end up being head-hunted by an existing player.
Bit of a gamble, but it has worked for a lot of projects/people in the past. Basically make it the “crown jewels” of your resume and hope to benefit from it that way (indirectly).
You’re in a tricky situation. Commercialising an idea is a totally alien process for the vast majority of developers, and requires a completely different skill set. You also won’t get a second chance. It’s a high-stakes game that “people like us” are not well-equipped to play.
It’s not entirely platform agnostic but i’m not tied to VMware in any strict sense. I could just as well build it on hyper-v as the backbone but that would require a few more workarounds. VMware just so happened to be the most convenient. Citrix is not an option.
I was going to make a fun video on this and joke how Jensen would be hiring bitcoin assassins but now it’s dawned on me it wouldn’t just be him.
Hell I wouldn’t put it past the people of level1 to pool their resources to gline me irl if my dumb eagerness to show something cool resulted in everyone losing the ability to virtualize anything on consumer hardware.
If you plan on making this a business you’re going to want a written business plan, a lawyer, and usually a pretty significant amount of capital in the bank.
The business plan will do two things, 1. lay everything out for potential investors so they know what you are doing and the risk involved, and 2. show you what you need to work on before starting the business. If you have a hard time on a section of the business plan (e.g. marketing) then that is something you may need to work on, because if it’s hard before you start the business it’s only going to be harder after you start.
The lawyer is to ensure that you have all the legal steps taken that are required to start a business in your locale. Usually there’s a lot more paperwork involved than simply creating a name and going at it when starting a business. It sounds like in your case you may want them to go over any EULA and/or ToS for VMWare or whatever product you are based off of.
Capital is because many small business either don’t pull a profit right off or they simply fail. Statistically speaking it takes about two years for a small business to become profitable. In the US 20% of small businesses fail within the first year, 50% within five years, and 65% within ten years. So be prepared to hemorrhage money for a while.
I’ve been working on this project for several years and at every step of the way it’s involved some ridiculous workaround in order for me to achieve the results I wanted. At each of these stages I have exhausted all resources that could help me find other people who have attempted anything similar. I’m reasonably confident in saying no one else has replicated what I’ve done. If that were the case they haven’t shared either their questions or their finished solution, not anywhere on an english language platform at least.
Also if VMware themselves or any of the other vendors knew what their products were capable of I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t restrict usage either via drivers or licensing restrictions and they should reasonably have much more reason than me to suss out edge cases involving mad geniuses making a mockery of their market segmentation.
This too is a concern.
I’m a working class guy. It’d be a real tall order for me to start my own business, even with a competetive product.
Sounds like something you could opensource and sell consulting services to small business, or you could have a “community edition” and a “supported/premium” edition.
Does you current employer care about any IP rights here?
If not opensource-ing, can you easily demo / present the product?
Having trouble wrapping my head around what you’re talking about. You’ve configured a VMWare environment in a novel way that circumvents licensing? Utilizes hardware more efficiently? What costs have you reduced?
If you have a great way to set up a vmware environment, then you’d probably be best off consulting or simply getting a job doing that… I don’t see how it’s a product in itself though.
I machine, bend, cut, drill and weld metal. My employer has no interest in the tomfoolery I get up to during weekends.
Creating a VDI deployment typically means big investments into enterprise hardware and software licensing or dumpster diving for old K2 cards. I rely on neither. I’ve been able to find an edge case that is fully compliant yet grants me the performance, usability, security and ease of management that would otherwise cost me ten to twenty times what I’ve spent.
Best guess that I can glean is this is a hack job on existing products that expands usability of hardware that is usually locked down hard. Don’t fool around with any LLC or anything and incorporate way better tax breaks and many more options with financing.
Some custom stuff but that’s just for convenience. Everything of consequence is just off the shelf hardware/software.
Not even that. No hacks, no exploits. Just a clever configuration of disparate technologies. Heck VMware even have documentation in their knowledge base of the one key workaround that makes it all possible, they just haven’t accounted for all the other workarounds layered on top that ultimately undercuts their top of the line offerings.
Now if they really wanted to capitalize on this opportunity they’d incorporate all those workarounds into a single product aimed squarely at small business/home use and make absolute bank as the dominant entity in a virgin market all while protecting their current enterprise business. I could do that for them but I haven’t the first clue how to reach out to them or where.
I would find the smallest business you can who is already using vdi and then pitch to them how much money you can save them. Run their shop as a proof of concept for a year or so and then scale up from there if there are no issues. If it’s all you say it is, word of mouth will probably do the selling for you to a large extent.
I obviously have no idea what exactly you’re talking about, but I would give the TOS a good read to make sure you’re not inadvertently violating it. The way you’re describing it sounds like it’s not intended use so if it ever does actually threaten their enterprise vdi business, they’re going to close whatever loophole or configuration stack that you’ve worked out.