Quoted post unavailable.
Which kind did you get?
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
41–50 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#42Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#43Not 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
How do you make sure you get the good type of sales culture that is customer-centric, rather than the bad type of "trick customers into buying things they don't need"? Are there specific policies/incentives/etc that should be used? Or is it really just 'hire the right people'?
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#44Not 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…
Hiring sales people is easy. But finding good sales people is really hard!
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#45I second this one… I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
Maybe minecraft :/
Notch constantly advertised his game on a popular imageboard and evaded bans for spamming.
He did not credit Infiniminer as a copycat. Got super rich.
Fits the MS culture perfectly.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#46Not being afraid to lose to learn… Reach out to customers with the MVP and just incorporate the feedback until the feedback changes from “we can’t use it because…” to “we need this integration” to “we need this pricing”
It took me a while to learn/accept this point. But there are too many such points that founders need to know, or it kills the business. I'm now working on a web app to help founders build companies. I'm trying to pack it with useful advice such as this. https://cxo.industries
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#47Quoted post unavailable.
Were you specifically discriminating against minorities before you "decided" to hire them?
That would be illegal in a lot of countries
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#48Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.
Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday). Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world. Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work.…
Gmail was the world leading email provider before any of the google custom domain stuff.
You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#50Launch (instead of waiting for the perfect product)
For us it was Show HN. But can be anything - Product Hunt, Redit, etc.