Ask HN: Can I really create a company around my open-source software? | Hacker News
I get that you've worked on this for months, that you're burned out generally, and now unemployed. So this comment is not meant as "mean" but rather offered in the spirit of encouragement.
Firstly, building a business (especially in a crowded space) is stressful. It's not a place to recover from burnout. It's not a place that reduces anxiety. So my first recommendation is to relax a bit, put this on the back burner, and when you're ready go look for your next job.
Secondly, treat this project as an education. You had an idea and spent months implementing it. That's the easy part. The hard part is finding a market willing to pay money for something.
So for your next project do the hard part first. First find a market, find out what they will spend, ideally collect a small deposit (to prove they're serious) and then go from there.
In my business we have 3 main product lines. The first 2 happened because the market paid us to build a solution. We iterated on those for 30 years, and we now are big players (in very niche spaces.)
The 3rd happened as a take-over of a project by another retiring developer. He had a few customers, and a good product, but in a crowded space where there's lots of reasons not to change. It's taken many years to build it out, despite being clearly better than the competition, and it's still barely profitable (if you ignore a bunch of expenses paid by the whole business. )
The lesson being to follow the money, not the idea. (Aside, early on we followed some ideas, all those projects died, most without generating any revenue.)
So congratulations to seeing something through to release. But turning a product into a business is really hard. Turning a commodity like this into a business is almost impossible.
I wish you well in your future endeavors.
For a major commercial product I visited similar markets to ours, knocked on the doors of distributors, tried to find people who wanted to integrate our product into their market. I failed a lot but succeeded twice, and those 2 have been paying us lots of money every year for 20 years as they make sales.
Your approach may vary. Start locally. Talk to shop keepers, restaurants, businesses, charities, schools and so on. Look for markets that are not serviced (which is different to where the person is just too cheap, or adverse to tech for other reasons.)
Of course it's a LOT harder now to find unserviced markets. There's a lot more software out there now than there was when I started out. Ultimately though it's about connecting with people - real people not just sending out spam emails. And so meeting the right person at the right time is "lucky". But if you're not out there luck can't work with you. You need to give luck a chance.