Here's what I would have thought of doing if I were you:
Step 1: Copy github, but with features people want.
Step 2: Online IDE for the projects (with distributed compilation/testing).
Step 3: Market place where people can hire programmers on demand to work on their project.
I hope you are not suggesting they implement a new Git hosting product, because that would be an extreme waste of time/money. Implementing the hosting logic/UI would probably chew up a year or two of development time. I don't know how long sourcegraph has been in development but this is what they are doing.
The smart thing to do in my mind is just build on top of Gogs/GitLab/Bitbucket/GitHub. You may want to focus mainly on Gogs/GitLab/Bitbucket instead though. And the reason why I say this is because I think the vast majority of GitHub/GitHub Enterprise customers are script related shops that develop in JavaScript, Ruby, etc.
> Step 3: Market place where people can hire programmers on demand to work on their project.
Unless you can draw an audience (millions of users) like GitHub/Stackoverflow, I wouldn't even ponder this. What I really think is a smart play is
which doesn't require millions of eyeballs. They just need to continually attract really bright university kids/seasoned programmers for this to be viable. This is definitely not monster.com, but if it works out, they are looking at a very comfortable lifestyle business.
1. Offer a hosted version where I can log-in with my github login, select a repo with C++ and have it indexed.
Use github model: open-source repos are free (and act as advertising for you) and charge for private repos.
Alternatively, create an index for a current version at the time of importing but charge for re-indexing new checkins. Allow people to sponsor a given repo (i.e. anyone could sponsor indexing a public repo, not only the owner).
2. Put more effort into making self-hosted version easy to use, e.g. provide a docker image.
Independently, there are possible UI improvements, like:
* a keyboard shortcut for going to search field (see how I use '/' or Esc for activating search field in https://quicknotes.io/u/w9Yw/kjk)
* tabs. When e.g. doing a search for all usages of a symbol, I usually don't want to loose focus. This is additional information but currently it replaces what I'm looking at. It should be launched in a separate tab or split into 2 windows and have the results in a side window
I use it for few months: http://vmorgulys.github.io/stackcity/doc/woboq/html/stackcit...
I have a lot of errors (from clang) because I use some C++17 stuff (from gcc, not yet in clang) but the output is still generated.
I wonder I anybody as an experience with DXR:
https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/
About money I think it's difficult to sell something like that but those guys are in that domain too:
Someone pointed static analysis. It's a good idea to add a value that is not accessible with the free version.
Also ruby/python support would be awesome, although a huge can of worms.
Right now we're wondering how to make a bit of money out of this. Do you have any hints or recommendations? (consulting/contract work is the main income for the company currently)
Current license and price: https://woboq.com/codebrowser.html#license