STORY

Empowering Businesses with Scalable, Flexible eCommerce Solutions

SpurtCommerce provides modern, customizable eCommerce solutions designed to help businesses launch, scale, and succeed across B2B, B2C, and marketplace models

I had just joined my family business (furniture manufacturing) and the company was reeling under a bad ERP implementation. It was a local vendor who was building it out on the .NET platform, and after sinking a reasonable sum of money into it, he was not able to get it right. At that point, my faith in the entire ERP industry was pretty low. Either they were too expensive or they were very buggy.

Later, I heard the same story from many of my users. But in all my foolishness and enthusiasm, I started writing out my own ERP system. I was always a hobbyist programmer, and maybe I had too much faith in my ability, but somehow we got started. In a couple of years though, the family business was sold and I was on my own. I decided to keep building the ERP and see if I could get more users, so I started my own company in 2008 to productize the ERP that I was building. At that point, what I had built was just about holding and not good enough to be a product, so I rewrote it (a couple of times!). And in 2010, we named the project ERPNext and launched it on a Software as a Service (SAAS) business model. And as you would expect, the going was tough.

No one wanted to buy an ERP from a startup. ERPs are mission critical assets for a company, and they don’t mind overspending because the cost of failure is high. A failed ERP implementation could cost customer happiness, employee happiness, and in some extreme cases, the company itself. Also since our pricing was very low, we found that engagement was not very high. But even then, a few users saw potential in our product.

Open source code

We licensed the code under the General Public License, and the code had been online on Google Code since 2009, but we never really positioned ourselves as an open source product initially. There were no clear deployment instructions, very sparse documentation and no community forum. Being in India, we had very little exposure to what an open source community was like and how to build an open source product. Though I had read all about the Free Software movement and read Linus Torvald’s book, I understood the concept, but did not know how to start executing it.

In 2011, we moved from Google Code to GitHub, and that proved to be a turning point. Now, suddenly, we were in the company of many open source projects and it felt nice to start using GitHub’s workflows, issues lists, and more to make ourselves more friendly to the community. Slowly, in 2012, we started positioning ourselves more as an open source ERP, and very slowly we saw more activity on our mailing list and an occasional issue raised by the community. In 2013, we revamped our deployment architecture to become more Pythonic (WSGI) and also started giving out free virtual machines for users to evaluate and use. This kickstarted a community.

Today we have more than 1000 people on our discussion forum, and we believe there could be around 500 companies using our ERP at different stages. In the process, we have close to 300 users using our paid services (hosting or deployment support), and we even managed to get a couple of sponsors.

OUR HISTORY

Empowering Businesses with Scalable Flexible eCommerce Solutions