General discussion of OpenCATS

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#268
Dear Asim,

I have been thinking a lot about writing this to you, but finally i decided to do it. As a matter of fact, I do respect you and your company for the tremendous effort you exerted in the dream of having a cheap / affordable solution for recruiters to work on a solid, well tested system. As far as I know, I’ve read some of the code from CATS 9.1, and it’s a huge application. If anyone reading this post knows anybody who has stepped forward and taken the initiatve of doing what Asim Biag did, please come forward and name them. Otherwise, everyone who has negative feelings about the way things have gone with the CATS System Development Should pay respect to the effort and contribution this man has done to the Recruiting industry as a whole.

Now, to my point: the major problem that has been hindering CATS from being open source anymore is mainly money. We've all seen the huge success and adoption levels that CATS has done worldwide. Many have used it as a solution of choice to address their needs for a good ATS. But still, none of this has paid back to Asim and his team who have made the effort to make this happen. I see two solutions to this situation:

1- CATS Open Source Version can still continue while at the same time bringing great income for Cognizo by implementing an advertisement system inside CATS Open Source itself. Ever CATS implementation has to have access to steady internet connection while being used. IF the pages of CATS cannot load the advertisements from Google or Ad Bright or any other advertising network, then the pages do not load. This way, you can monetize the great success you've already achieved. Everyone having a CATS installation somewhere in the world and would like to upgrade to the latest version can upgrade, but this time they will have to pay some bandwidth by accepting to load AD's in the favor of Cognizo.

I believe this method will bring great returns back to the creator of CATS because the amount of pages loaded in the candidates, jobs, contact, and especially search pages are huge.

2- If advertisement is not favorable to you, CATS Open Source version can still be offered at extremely /ridiculously low user fees. For instance, if there are 30,000 CATS users worldwide, if you take 2$ each month from them, you'll be making around 60,000$ Monthly!!! And 2$ for each user is a very very reasonable fee that every recruiter will feel ashamed not to pay. it’s not even as much as he pays for his coke or sandwiches each day! So everyone will want to do this. Also yearly plans would insure great income for Cognizo. if you make each user pay 2$/month, which is like 24$/year, yearly payments can include discounts like Two Months free, so you can take 20$ instead of 24$ and while each system implementation will never include any less than like 5 users, you will be getting like a 100$ per year from each organization..

if you do not like this calculation, look at it this way. The new version coming out will include like only 25% of the 30,000 users, which is like 7500 users only. If you manage to make 7500 users pay you 2$/month you'll be making 15,000$ MONTHLY!!! Is that good enough to pay off your development team? I think if it doesn't cover their salaries, at least it'll pay a good sum of it.

3- Make support calls PAID FOR! Don’t give free support, because it already costs you more to support people than to just continue the development itself. Those asking for support are usually people who are not willing to fiddle with code or tire themselves and they have money to pay for it.

4- you can even incorporate both methods, low fees and advertisement! This way you can make even more money to ensure development continues and make a small margin for you as well. Plus Make money off support calls and emails!

Once your user base increases, you can make them pay more per user to upgrade.. OR make more money from the Advertisements.

Asim, there are many ways to capitalize on the success you've already created. Do not lose your user base because you just want to keep the code in-house!

Now that you've made CATS a SaaS only service, how much increase have you seen in revenue and adoption of the new system? I bet if you had like 20 hosted users before, now you have like 30 or 40 max!; Which is not the kind of value that you are looking to gain against the huge loss in popularity that you will experience once CATS goes inside the closet.

Take example, Microsoft always made it easy for people to break into their software, this was to ensure the wide spread of usage and this is where they got all their money from! Appreciate the value of a free user to your bottom line, as it adds you a lot, but you just don’t see where the money is! The money lies in the fact that NOW.. You have a huge user base. so start looking into how to take from both kinds of your users, the RICH (Corporate and enterprise users) and the POOR (stand alone and close user group recruiters) who are already creating your FAME!

Sorry for the lengthy post, but I’ve really wanted to tell you this a long time ago, and I hope I wasn't offensive in anyway. I just want to give you some good advice weather you see from my point of view or not.

Regards,

-Mahmoud Abdalla

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