I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
> product in this world that truly sells itself
Fiat currency.
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
31–40 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#32Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for – Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will star…
This 100%! My experience here: https://twitter.com/paulstovell/status/1389881033470869504 This talk by Paul Kenny is a really good talk here about the value of the sales function even if you don't want the revenue : Paul Kenny: Selling Sales to Techies (2010): https://vimeo.com/96703844
Hey, thank you for this. Can I pick your brain about it sometime? I couldn't find contact info in your profile - my email is ege at pricetable dot io
edit: why am I getting downvotes...
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#33I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.
Once upon a time when it was Fog Creek, no, no, no…
I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#34Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#35Added rocket engines to the base
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#36Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#37Me and my two co-founders are asking ourselves this all the time, and in retrospect every strategic change could have happened sooner if we had learnt faster and kept “doing things that don’t scale” as PG famously wrote years ago. The funny thing is that we think we are doing great in that regard only to realize again and again that we have to iterate faster and stop the urge to prematurely optimize for scale. Our la…
Are you saying to take on the consultancy contracts? I fall into that trap as the consultancy contracts are essentially my day job.
Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#38Moved up market and started selling to enterprise. Go where the money is.
I'm in the process of doing this now with my first enterprise meeting coming up this week.
Could you share more insight on the shift from D2C to B2B? What challenges did you face while making this transition and how did you combat them?
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#39Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#40Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for – Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will star…
Ok, great advice, but what was the dynamic between customer build outs and sales? Are you selling basically an as-is product? Is there customization required (preloading data, training, etc) to 'make the sale'? I'm asking because I'm in an interesting position where I have a very nice platform, but it requires solutions specialists paired with salespeople, so outstripping specialists with sales growth isn't as produc…
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