Anu and Rufus re ../projects/product-plan-2023
Anu and Rufus re ../projects/product-plan-2023
Present: Rufus, Anu
Intention: get in sync so we are on the same page re product owner work on key offers (and supporting stacks)
Agenda
- Check-in
- Create agenda
- Review agenda
- Updates per "product" or stack
- Discuss SaaS offer and plan for it https://github.com/datopian/product/issues/50
- Discuss: What are our metrics / goals for SaaS
- Write out our (very short) strategy about SaaS including OKRs
- Tech roadmap for stacks
- Portals
- DataHub Next https://github.com/datopian/datahub-next/issues/1
- Product owner & Rufus plans
- AOB
- Using the discussions forum on portals-monorepo ✅2023-03-28 agree to use this
- Deprecating https://gitlab.com/datopian/kb? (do we want to migrate stuff from the kb?) ✅2023-03-28 ❌ agreed to deprecate. won't move.
- Fjelltopp ✅2023-03-28 struggling with UN tenders. Can do work sharing
- DCAT-AP ✅2023-03-28 need to support it, need to look at it. ⏭️ @anuveyatsu to open a discussion on forum
- Data.gov (Joel / Iain) re issues with harvesting ✅2023-03-28 all our discussion moved to https://github.com/datopian/portals-monorepo/discussions/186
- Using the discussions forum on portals-monorepo ✅2023-03-28 agree to use this
- Check-out and next steps
- ACTION? @anuveyatsu re https://github.com/ckan/ckan/issues/7492 ⏭️ Post this https://datahub.io/docs/dms/harvesting with e.g. "this was the detailed plan for an improved harvester we developed in 2018-2020 …"
- @rufuspollock move harvesting notes to the discussion
- @anuveyatsu Add discussion about DCAT-AP stuff in forum
Notes
KPIs 🚧
🚩 brief discussino
Look at the funnel and work through that
- Number of (good) inquiries
- Number that become a call
- Number that we close
Updates
Open Data Portal SaaS
#todo/process
- How many inquiries have we had? i can see 83 contacts in sendinblue in the last week. of which a small fraction look good (i.e. business etc) 🚩 don't know exactly
- How many did we have before, before having the form ✅2023-03-28 40 unique visitors a day before. with form around 10 per day.
- Pricing
- Per portal 👍 yes definitely
- Per publisher (eg, 5 user) 👍? don't think so to start
- Maybe datasets / storage (for the most basic one) 👍👎 (people worry then about no datasets) have a soft limit
- Per feature 👍👍 yes definitely
- Pricing tiers e.g. Starter, Premium, VIP/Enterprise
- Our approach: Our goal is "democratising the power of data" so let's pass on whatever we can
- Maybe soft limits on data api and storage (e.g. 1TB on starter plan for storage, Data API usage)
- See ODS landing language - https://www.opendatasoft.com/en/open-data-and-strengthen-transparency/ Do we want something like opendatasoft more generic pitch page ✅2023-03-28 Rufus: i'd say no, that's kind of fluffy, far up the funnel. Let's focus on people who want a portal and our resellers
- Do we know our own costs? ✅2023-03-28 for our SaaS option. For one portal: $300 / month. At that drops linearly up to say 10 portals
- Rufus aside: that suggests pricing starter at e.g. $99 a month. And Premium between 200-500 …
Questions
- Of all the enquiries through DataHub over last 6-7m have any resulted in business? ✅2023-03-28 don't believe so
Notes from Anu outflow
- Writing a document about Open Data Portal SaaS (an intro article) so that I can present it e.g. what features are there, … to potential reseller partners
- Need a pricing
- So i can give to others on the team?💬2023-03-28 Rufus: this seems a low priority
What do we want to learn? Is there plausibly product market fit?
- Starting with people them
- Market is …
- Intermediaries e.g. resellers
- Actual users i.e. cities and govs
- We want to learn:
- Do they see any users for this?
- What is the key selling points? i.e. what are the pain points currently? e.g. cost, complexity, extensibility (lock-in)? I want to be in something that's supported long-term?
- Do we have the technical features that are needed e.g. DCAT-AP?
- What price point?
- Do they see any users for this?
Toolkit
DataHub Next
see Demo section in https://github.com/datopian/datahub-next/issues/66
- Showcase working for data rich documents
- Showcase working for Frictionless Datasets
- Hiring data journalist for a trial
What are these meetings about?
Primarily: Rufus supporting Anu in leading the Offers work at Datopian covering things like:
- Stacks or a specific one
- Offers or a specific one
Working as "product owners" i.e. people choosing the features and roadmap for our development of a stack or offer
Contacts for reseller etc etc
🚚 MOVED to
Spreadsheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1P4P-IoN4Nl_3-jZaC7xVWHxbeaV6Rkr8Vmb-RLCtRfE/edit#gid=0
- 🇫🇷 Multi-coop Johan Richer the founder of https://www.multi.coop/?locale=fr 🔥🔥 (Rufus knows them well)
- 🇫🇮 Open Knowledge Finland @rufuspollock could dig out a contact
- 🇨🇭 LIIP also others (e.g. Open Data Switzerland) status: have contact, need to arrange meeting 🔥🔥
- 🇧🇷 Open Knowledge Brazil, our own team
- 🇺🇸 Joel, Civic Actions … 🔥🔥
- Friendly cities e.g. santa monica
- 🇸🇦 (Middle East) ?? Maiada …
- 🇦🇪 Christ (Maiada)
- 🇩🇪 our old partners todo 🔥
- Sebastian Moleski …??? 🤣
- 🏴 ?? (Rufus, Open Data Institute?, old contacts)
- 🇮🇹 Open Knowledge Italy old contacts. a borroso etc
- 🇳🇬 (Nigeria) our team …?
- 🇲🇦 (Morocco) ??
- 🇩🇰 Denmark (Franc)
- 🇸🇪 Sweden (new lead from Stockholm)
- 🇪🇸 Spain - we had partners there (just gone quiet). Desidedatum Marc Garriga (CEO)
- 🇨🇿 Czech Republic (I can check if somebody)
- 🇰🇿 Central Asia (Kazakhstan/Uzbekistan) - Azamat (via Anu)
Create Strategy and Plan for Open Data Portal SaaS Offer
https://link.excalidraw.com/l/9u8crB2ZmUo/7aQ1Yf6pQW9
Outcomes for the planning work
- Internal "landing page" giving 5Ws (what, why, where, when, who)
- SCQA?
- Hypothesis tree = List of hypotheses 🏆🏆🏆
- Core hypothesis
- Hypothesis tree = List of hypotheses 🏆🏆🏆
- Business model canvas?
- OKRs
- Plan of work 🔥🔥
- Budget
Question:
- How do we find leads?
- What's our pitch?
- What features we should have?
- How do we sell to them?
- Why whould they buy from us?
Hypothesis:
- We can find leads via existing partners/relationships.
- We can target specific regions with a relevant pitch (e.g., check regions where we have clients).
- We can have specific pitch per region, e.g.
- EU -> DCAT-AP
- Switzerland -> DCAT-AP-CH
- Our main competitive advantage (compared to who) is accessibility, (cost-effectiveness) and feature-rich and low-effort.
- Re CKAN: CKAN has reputation (ironically) of being expensive an/or difficult to use (because you need special expertise to host and maintain it)
- We should talk to our partners and listen to feedback to understand what features would be great to have.
We believe X (or have question X)
We can test it by doing Y
And will know by time Z
🚚 Open Data Portal SaaS Plan
🚚 MOVED to ../projects/portals-saas-2023
We can cost-effectively (i.e. profitably) gain new [open] data portals business [how much, by when] [in the next year], and medium-term (next 3y?) build a profitable SaaS business in open data portals with $1m+ in ARR.
- Do we focus only on open data portals e.g. open data soft seemed to have pivoted somewhat successfully
- Bigger question: is there a way to frame a portal differently and usefuly from a "data catalog" which has got a bit done to death now?
- Our current situation
- Our current ARR in hosted data portals is X
- We can be profitable
- The LTV of a new customer will be at least 3 - $30k)
- It costs us $100-300 / month to run a SaaS data portal
- We will have blended margins 2x that so at least 1-3k per year
- Customers stay with us at least 3y
- Cost of acquisition: it will cost us no more than 2k per customer for the next 10 customers
- We need to bid on Y RFPs
- Truth is we have little idea here. Key point is for us to track cost
- The LTV of a new customer will be at least 3 - $30k)
- We can acquire customers
- We have acquired customers
- We can acquire customers via RFPs
- We can acquire customers via direct
- The market size is $100m+
- There are estimated Y open data portals 💬2023-03-28 at least 50 big ones (e.g. major govs) and would guess at least another 1000 smaller ones
- Average revenue is at least $10k / year
Tasks
MVP
- I need a pitch (outline of MVP)
- Test it with …
Key question: how do we acquire clients? And can we acquire enough cost-effectively?