My two week project turned into a full-time open source startup

Started a software company

Over a year ago I decided to build a software business that focused on custom web application development, startups, and unique website projects. I had built a very strong and talented team who were ambitious to start this company with me as their side gig. We called it Vampeo. We acquired a bunch of projects and started development while keeping our daily jobs.

Long running projects

After four months of completing some of our projects, I realized something significant. No project was ever completed. Once the project (e.g. website) was delivered, every client started asking for additional features, support, maintenance, updates, and even future projects.

These additional services introduced a new stream of recurring revenue for Vampeo. Clients would pay for servers, email addresses that we setup through G Suite, SSL renewals, website edits, etc.

Wasting my time with invoices

In November 2016, I started gathering all the invoices to email to our clients. I had a Quickbooks Online account that I used to send invoices to clients, however, there was a much larger problem. Many of our services were offered as monthly or yearly subscriptions. For example, clients would pay Vampeo monthly cost for their servers and emails, annually for domain and SSL, and on-demand hourly fees for feature developments. It was extremely hard to send invoices to our customers at the end of each month, or keep track of who hasn’t paid their annual fees. I started falling behind in invoices, loosing money, and loosing track of our maintained services.

A small project to automate my business

There was no easy solution to our problem. Our service offerings and billing were handled in separate applications and required lots of manual work. We needed a system with the following features:

* Automatically charge the client based on the services they have with us.* Customer self-service portal for clients to login to an online account, view, edit, request cancellation of their current services, and communicate with us through the portal for additional work.* Internal inventory of our work to keep track of all our active and archived projects, provide us our total revenue, profit, and progress.

Every commercial solution we found was too expensive without covering every use-case, and every open source solution was outdated with a very bad UI/UX. So we decided to spend our two week New Years holiday to develop a very simple platform, leveraging Stripe’s API to build a web application that fulfills all the above features. Boy was I wrong about the two week timeframe!

Two weeks turned into months, and then… ServiceBot

The entire development revolved around our mindset of open sourcing our work. It required proper architecture, planning, and implementation. Our years of experience as automation architects & engineers got the best of us. We started adding more features, automating the billing using Stripe, notification system, and much more. Our platform grew from a simple NodeJS and Express app into using NodeJS, Express, React, Redux, and many more cutting edge npm libraries.

The decision was clear, this wasn’t just a side project anymore, this was the real thing. We were a team of four developers and one graphic designer and we spent every minute of our free time outside of our daily jobs to focus on developing this system. We called it ServiceBot, an open source Gig Management System. A platform which you could use to start selling and managing your Gig in just minutes.

Limited open-beta instances… available now

We released our v0.1 Beta in May and showcased it at Collision 2017. The feedback was extremely positive, it seemed like every other service-based startup was facing a similar issue. After Collision, we spent the entire summer retuning our code and feature set.

It has now been eight months since we started building ServiceBot, and we are now on version 0.5 beta of ServiceBot. ServiceBot’s Github repository contains all of our hard work and we want to share it with everyone and get feedback.

In fact, we have decided to give out limited open-beta ServiceBot instances on our website. It will take just under couple of minutes to setup your ServiceBot website without any technical knowledge, installation, or lengthy configuration. All that’s needed is a Stripe account as ServiceBot is tightly integrated with Stripe.

If you are interested in testing out our limited open-beta instances you can signup on our front page: https://servicebot.io

Next steps

We hope to grow ServiceBot into a complete automation system for businesses to cut cost by automating their daily operations and life cycle of their services.

I will be posting more about the use-cases and features of ServiceBot in my future posts.