u/a0817a90

From the 2025 numbers, it looks like Sales & Marketing eats up around 35-45% of their revenue, while R&D/Engineering only gets maybe 15-20%.

Fabien always talks about a "product over everything" philosophy, so spending double on ads compared to dev work feels wild.

Is this just standard financial engineering to hit that 42% ARR growth target for a PE exit, or is there a massive bucket leak under the hood?

My theory is that because they push the all-in-one monolith model, tons of smaller companies buy 20+ seats, hit a brutal implementation wall, and immediately downgrade to 5 or 10 seats at renewal just to keep basic invoicing or CRM alive.

If that seat contraction is a typical scenario, Odoo is basically forced to burn an insane amount of cash on Google Ads and global roadshows just to dump new users into the top of the funnel and outrun the leakage.

Either that, or they’ve just completely arbitraged their development costs by shifting the heavy engineering lifting to lower-cost tech hubs (like India) while paying premium western currency for global ad networks.

To any partners or devs in here who see the churn and implementation success rates firsthand... what's the actual reality on the ground? Are we buying business software, or are we just funding a massive marketing treadmill?

I work for a private equity-owned specialized construction company in commercial glazing, so I’m seeing this from the portco/operator side.

It feels like the 2010s market made it easier for PE to win with cheap debt, even without deep domain expertise or without attacking the core process complexity of businesses.

That model also explains a lot of the bad reputation. The debt and majority portion of the risk sit at the portco, accountability is blurry, and the short-term vision/incentives can easily become bad for employees, customers, and long-term operators.

The market feels different now. Higher rates, less forgiving customers, high competition, lower prices, harder growth, and still deep operational complexity.

Am I wrong to believe that the tougher landscape now forces the true kind of long-term value creation? The kind that is actually beneficial for portcos and society in general:

The hard part now is not buying the company. It is understanding the messy core of the business well enough to redesign how value is actually produced.

Is the industry actually shifting toward real business building and domain expertise?

I work for a PE-owned specialized construction company in commercial glazing, so I’m seeing this from the portco/operator side.

It feels like the 2010s market made it easier for PE to win with cheap debt, even without deep domain expertise or without attacking the core process complexity of businesses.

That model also explains a lot of the bad reputation. The new LBO debt and majority portion of the risk sit at the portco, accountability is blurry, and the short-term vision/incentives can easily become bad for employees, customers, and long-term operators.

The market feels different now. Higher rates, less forgiving customers, high competition, lower prices, harder growth, and still deep operational complexity.

Am I wrong to believe that the tougher landscape now forces the true kind of long-term value creation? The kind that is actually beneficial for portcos and society in general:

Getting deep enough into the product, the processes and the bottlenecks to actually rebuild how the company works.

Is the industry actually shifting toward real business building and domain knowledge?

Avec le lancement récent du projet-pilote pour le Dossier santé numérique (le fameux système de la compagnie Epic) en Mauricie–Centre-du-Québec et dans le Nord-de-l'Île-de-Montréal, je serais curieux d'avoir vos retours de terrain.

Si vous êtes travailleur de la santé (médecin, infirmière, TI, archiviste, etc.) ou même un patient qui a commencé à voir les changements : comment se passe votre expérience jusqu'à présent ?

I’m not a developer, but I build/maintain internal Power Apps.

My main problem is that with growing complexity of an app, it takes a lot of time to rebuild context for an LLM/AI assistant: control names, property formulas, data sources, fragile logic, etc.

What is the most efficient way to generate or maintain LLM-friendly text context files for a Canvas app?

Option I’m considering:
Power Platform Git integration + Azure DevOps repo to expose .pa.yaml files

For SharePoint-backed apps, I assume the app source won’t fully capture SharePoint column types, so a separate schema file may still be needed.

What workflow has worked best for you to help AI understand a Canvas app quickly without manually documenting everything? Please include licensing requirements in the answer.

We’re a specialized construction company evaluating an ERP built on a heavily customized version of Odoo 13 (self-hosted by the vendor on Google cloud). The vendor has no plans to migrate and maintains the platform themselves.

Is this a good long-term bet for us as a customer? What are the real risks we should be thinking about? Can it be stable for another 5-10 years without any version migration ?

I get that software evolves but every single year a breaking major version? I’ve used a lot of tools but nothing else where that frequency of forced migration had to be managed.

How much of each release is actual innovation versus fixing what shipped broken the year before?

Genuine question: who actually benefits most from this cadence? Because from where I’m sitting a yearly breaking release looks a lot like a yearly guaranteed revenue event for every partner in the ecosystem.

Maybe I’m missing something technical. Would love to hear from others.

In all honesty, since we’re anonymous here, how many GC estimators in the last year have taken his sub’s most detailed and clear proposal, stripped out the value engineering and cost-saving ideas, and shopped them to competitors?

Let’s hear who’s brave enough to admit it and what the excuses are.

Hey guys, looking for a reality check from in-house admins.

I’m planning to add a bunch of date fields, dropdowns, and M2M lists to CRM via Studio. I also need conditional visibility and some "if this, then that" automated actions.

Odoo says Studio is upgrade-safe, but I’ve heard it can be a nightmare where UI layouts get nuked or logic breaks when moving between versions (v17 to v18 for example).

How much "fixing" do you actually have to do after a migration?

Users and admins only please. No partners or resellers. I’ve already heard the sales pitch.