I’ve been ‘independent’ since the tail end of 2009 (one week before Christmas in fact) and have solely been doing work-for-hire stuff between now and then. I don’t scale to my ambitions, nor to my paranoias so I’ve been thinking about really figuring out what exactly is my business model, and I think I have figured it out.

  • Product – In my consulting I have seen that more often than not companies are not stuck with Selenium itself, but the framework around it. To that end I have released Saunter which is an ‘opinionated test framework’ similar to how RoR is opinionated. (There is more than one way to do things, but really only one easy way.)

    But since I have some Open Source Anarchist thoughts, I’m giving it away under the Apache 2 license. Which means I’m going to now be in the Freemium game if I want to keep paying my bills. And which leads us to…

  • Support – Let’s face it. Small teams will just take the code and figure out what they want to make it do. But medium or larger companies enjoy the security blanket of having support. Here I think I will have two options.
    1. Hourly – Companies can purchase blocks of my time on [essentially] a retainer basis. These blocks expire, but come with a certain level of service/response
    2. Per Incident – Companies can purchase per incident support tickets
  • Training – A large part of what I have been doing is training, or likely better stated as coaching. I can help you be more successful rolling out Selenium. This is at ‘standard’ training rates.

Dreaming up the model is however the easy part. Actually implementing it. Well, thats a bit more challenging.