I caught up with Suman of Rockstor recently.

I previously wrote about Suman managing an open source community. He’s been working on Rockstor for over 3 years, funding everything by himself.

He needs to find a way to keep the open source spirit alive for himself and at the same time pay rent. We live in San Francisco.

He believes he’s figured out a way to monetize his software. He now charges for stable releases and has picked up 10 paid users in about a week. That’s a great number. He will definitely focus on these first paying customers. If he can get to 10, 20 is just around the corner – I’m referencing an article from Saastr.

The core metric Suman will focus in the coming months is number of downloads. He believes the number of downloads will lend to increase the number of paid users. He’s aiming for 10,000 downloads. We’ll see how long it will take him to get there and what percentage would convert to paying.

From what I’ve heard through various new sources, Sourceforge isn’t a darling anymore. But Suman pointed out there exists no other platform to provide downloads. Hosting on Amazon S3 or your own VM doesn’t count. Rockstor needs exposure through users exploring a site.

Sourceforge provides a great marketplace. The value comes from recommending similar products. You can’t get that anywhere else. Even at Github. The competition is on Sourceforge, and Suman needs to be on there.

We’ll see how Suman does in the next few months. Check out Rockstor here!