I thank you for your honest and direct feedback. Obviously, it's very interesting for us to hear, and if you are right and we do not understand our target audience or our business model is flawed, then we have a problem that we should find out sooner rather than later.
You have a lot of criticism for how we position ourselves, and our product. I deeply believe that there is a market for a tool such as Helium, be it open- or closed source. Assuming that we have a product that the market wants, can you recommend a way for us to make this product open source, yet generate an income that allows us to sustain its development?
An idea (maybe too obvious) that comes to mind would be to host people's tests and send alerts when tests fail, then work up a deal with Heroku to offer your web testing service as a plugin. Many of the plugin services have the same type of tiered business model. You could do something like a 30 day trial (or, alternatively, 1 test per day free), then offer services for 50 requests, 500, 1000, etc. I'm not incredibly familiar with how frequently web tests run and how many pages/forms/fields the average project has, so obviously you'd have to tweak those numbers based on what you think will generate the most revenue.
You have a lot of criticism for how we position ourselves, and our product. I deeply believe that there is a market for a tool such as Helium, be it open- or closed source. Assuming that we have a product that the market wants, can you recommend a way for us to make this product open source, yet generate an income that allows us to sustain its development?