Kalzumeus

Have a read of this classic post by patio11:

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1

I can testify as to the troubles that flow from doing work for discounts or gratis; I'm currently four years into a client relationship where I started out by helping them out of a desperate situation with a cut-price block of work, then they've continued to build their business on the basis that I (or other consultants) can keep providing ongoing work at comparable cut-price rates. Any time we try and explain that they need to increase their budgets if they want to keep funding further enhancements work, they protest that they're a non-profit with very limited budgets - they just can't accept that it costs big dollars to do this kind of work on an ongoing basis. It's just super-hard to adjust the expectation once the client has locked in an idea of what the work is "worth".

It depends on what kind of "business" you want to create, and if you can
code, creating a software business is your best bet.

I checked your HN user profile and you're fairly new here, so I'd
suggest reading the posts of HN user 'patio11' [1,2] (otherwise known as
Patrick McKenzie ;-) and his blog posts [3]. Though his "training" site
might seem a bit too promotional [4] the content he sends through email
(and archives on the web) is surprisingly good [5]. You can literally
take just about any his blog posts or training urls, plug them into the
Algolia HN Search at the bottom of HN pages, and you'll find the
relevant discussions.

[1] h1ttps://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=patio11

[3] http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/

[4] https://training.kalzumeus.com/

[5] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales

Four requests to update their card on file (the day of the failure, the next day, three days after that, and seven days after that). Then the account is suspended. The whole "drip campaign" for dunning mails is a SQL query, two prewritten mails with some placeholders, and 21 lines of code that runs as a cron job once a day.

Recommended reading:

https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/rainy_day_ideas

http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/sample-dunning-email.png

If the user logs in to a suspended account, they're welcomed back and asked to update their payment information to reactivate the account. All their data is still waiting for them. Lots of people that disappear come back and reactivate at some point in the following months.

If you want to go the route of improving marketing, I'd suggest https://training.kalzumeus.com/ and associated links as a first cut.

That may not totally apply and you may be in a situation where you could easily justify hiring, depending on the income of the business, but it'll start you down what's probably a much better path than you're on now.

I know it's frustrating to ask how to do X and get told about how to do Y. However, I will say this: You describe some problems, then ask if open sourcing will work, and to be honest, I honestly have no idea why you think that problems connects with that solution. The average open source project crawls in a corner and dies. I think you'd be trading some admittedly long odds for some much longer ones.

Decide what you do best, and what you love the most. TO me it sounds like you love doing larger/medium scale projects and are getting bored with these smaller projects.

I am in a similar industry (in business for 5 years) and have had a lot of success, with some similar challenges.

this post helped me so much (originally found it here)
https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/consulting_1

One thing I had to decide was do I want to put more money in my pocket or grow my business.

I realized I didn't want to take bigger deals. The deals I was bringing in allowed an amount of profit for every deal. I just wanted more deals of that size. The challenge was how to scale that up.

Plugging these patio11 posts because a)they might be helpful if OP hasn't read them and b)even if OP has, somebody else here might not and they're pretty much evergreen:

The Black Art of SaaS Pricing: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/saas_pricing

Doubling Saas Revenue by Changing the Pricing Model: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/

Selling To The Fortune 500, Government, And Other Lovecraftian Horrors: https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/enterprise_sales

Patrick's default pricing model:
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/479095257284345857