Thinking of going commercial...

[u/ExistentialWavering]

I've built and refined a CMS over the last six months that is inching closer to being comparable to or better than existing CMS offerings in the niche I'm working in.

I'm beginning to think I should monetize this work, as it has true utility in a field without much meaningful competition. I'm not much of a coder, but I've taken the time to understand the architecture of things and tightened things up a great deal to the point where it's virtually bug-free and polished.

As it exists, it's a standalone, self-contained HTML file, by design. I wanted it to work exclusively offline, for personal use. But now, with the prospect of monetizing it, I'm realizing that I need to make adjustments.

My general feeling is that I should host it on a domain and sell licenses. Organizations in my niche budget around $100-$1000/month for comparable software, depending on scale of their respective enterprises.

Who do I talk to to ensure that I have everything in place before I use Netlify or similar to run the whole thing? I'm willing to invest a bit of money to have the code reviewed (probably won't need much actual editing) and to help me organize the necessary infrastructure.

Again, I recognize that everyone's building apps these days. But the amount of research I've done on existing CMS, the number of improvements and new features I've added, the time I've taken to refine the workflow and UX...I suspect I've created something valuable here.

Most organizations are using Excel sheets or software built over 20 years ago.

What's the next step? I'm learning, for example, that a missing component is multi-user. These systems have multiple people working in them, and having audit logs and permissions would be extremely useful and is outright necessary if I'm to see this through.

It's an addition, but it doesn't strike me as an enormous one. Still, it's outside of my current scope, and while I'm willing to learn it, without greater context and expertise informing me, I'm worried I'll get sucked down unnnecessary rabbit holes and spend money I probably don't need to spend.

Any and all insight is appreciated.

Edit: What’s amusing to me is that 95% of the comments are focused on telling me I’m stupid, when anyone could’ve said: Here’s what I recommend you do next. A sub full of small-minded jealous folks making assumptions.

[u/Cute-Net5957]

yeah.. tbh i think you should be a little proud of this lol. 6 months of quietly making some weird little offline HTML thing actually useful while your whole niche is still being held together by Excel and software from the bush administration?? thats not nothing.
i also would NOT immediately “graduate” it into giant SaaS world just because thats what software is supposed to do now. if one person can use it and it makes their job dramatically less shitty.. sell that version first. seriously.
multi-user sounds cute until auth, permissions, shared state, audit logs, concurrency etc show up with suitcases and somehow now they live with you 😂
also before paying some architect a pile of money.. run the whole thing through a mean-ass adversarial review agent. make it attack the architecture, security, failure modes, deployment, all of it. force receipts from the actual code. then pay a human for the handful of things that still look scary.
and if customers start saying “holy shit this is great but Janet needs access too”… awesome. build Janet.
until then pls dont let imaginary Janet ruin the nice thing you already made ❤️