I find that the key thing to overcome when selling to developers is the extreme reluctance to spend money buying something that they can build themselves. You see, 1.) Developers love to build things. 2.) Developers hate spending money. 3.) Developers undervalue their time. If your product looks like it would have been fun to build, you'll lose the entire "insufficiently supervised developer" demographic. Those guys…
- The product won't do things exactly the way you want. If you build it yourself, you get it the way that you wish it had been built.
- You're investing in someone else's product. Everything you invest in training and customization is wasted if you have to move to something else. You no longer have to worry about tech support either.
- You're locking yourself into someone else's product, and you're stuck if suddenly there's a big increase in price, the product shuts down (very common), or changes in some way (even more common).
- The "developer cost" is tricky. Salespeople like to pretend that you can calculate that using someone's salary. If you have an $80/hour developer spending five hours on something like this, you don't literally write a check for $400. Instead, that developer might have been doing something useful, but might also have been in a meeting or responding to email or just sitting around. One argument for 20% time is that the 20% spent on that work wouldn't have been used productively anyway.