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Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

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Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#31

Devtools is a hard sell but not impossible. Unfortunately Hashicorp didn't even try. The reason selling devtools is hard is there's generally no established budget to sell into. I already have budget for various things - a vendor comes to me and tries to sell their product/tool/saas I'm looking what I can move around to afford it. If yours does a better job of something I'm already paying for, then it's the easiest s…

A standard problem with dev tools is that they're obsolete before they're ever mature. What is mean is that by the time NewTool that fills a gap doing X really well catches up with the YZ that older tools have long experience handling, EvenNewerTool handles E better than NewTool does. I don't have any knowledge of the specifics here, but at first guess I doubt something security-focused would be an exception to that…

Hashicorp tools have been industry standard for many many years.

They just used to be free and open source.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#32
post #25

Guess who's having the last laugh? Alex. https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story

But didn't Alex likely get fired and offered a new position at a small town branch in Missouri?

Last I read, Alex was busy plotting Mitchell's demise, after being jailed for siphoning the funds off the dormant Hashicorp account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35163055

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#33

Devtools is a hard sell but not impossible. Unfortunately Hashicorp didn't even try. The reason selling devtools is hard is there's generally no established budget to sell into. I already have budget for various things - a vendor comes to me and tries to sell their product/tool/saas I'm looking what I can move around to afford it. If yours does a better job of something I'm already paying for, then it's the easiest s…

Based on my limited experience building enterprise product in security space. It is deliberately designed this way. You dont want to have variation in ticket size. Investors want to see large ticket size like 100k, but in your case, the margins would not be that great if the price was 30k per year or something, it would be the same effort as a 100k contract in the end of the day with implementation, onboarding, account management and operation support. P0 issue is P0, you want to maintain the same level of service across all customers. When you are an early stage you will have variance in pricing but it has to converge in order to build predictability.

In this particular case, devops or iac or gitops was huge driver for hashicorp. It was synonymous But as market turned as cloud providers mature it is falling out of trend.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#34

Devtools is a hard sell but not impossible. Unfortunately Hashicorp didn't even try. The reason selling devtools is hard is there's generally no established budget to sell into. I already have budget for various things - a vendor comes to me and tries to sell their product/tool/saas I'm looking what I can move around to afford it. If yours does a better job of something I'm already paying for, then it's the easiest s…

As someone who is about to launch my SAAS, what are some of the things you look for, as someone with purchase authority? What are the positives or negatives you see when dealing with vendors (i.e. what makes you lean towards or against dealing with a vendor)? I'm trying to figure out how I can make the process as easy as possible for exactly people in your position.

Take people out of the sign up flow. Have a form where you can enter the company credit card number and start receiving service.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shall see, my average cost is still down over 30% even with the after hours move up (facepalm). Hope to at least get back to even with an acquisition.

I’m down 40%. Is it typical to purchase that far above the current price?

Just depends. I think when I owned Slack for example shareholders got somewhere around a 50% premium on acquisition.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#36

After their disastrous license change and the reasons for it I figure their biggest Exit Plan would include being acquired. I made a couple of Option calls based on this. Monday could be good.

Imho, the license change didn't cause this. It was an attempt to make money. At that point they were already in trouble.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#37

Devtools is a hard sell but not impossible. Unfortunately Hashicorp didn't even try. The reason selling devtools is hard is there's generally no established budget to sell into. I already have budget for various things - a vendor comes to me and tries to sell their product/tool/saas I'm looking what I can move around to afford it. If yours does a better job of something I'm already paying for, then it's the easiest s…

A standard problem with dev tools is that they're obsolete before they're ever mature. What is mean is that by the time NewTool that fills a gap doing X really well catches up with the YZ that older tools have long experience handling, EvenNewerTool handles E better than NewTool does. I don't have any knowledge of the specifics here, but at first guess I doubt something security-focused would be an exception to that…

Yeah, see almost every "configuration management" tool aside from Ansible that promptly got made irrelevant for the majority of users once containerization hit the scene.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#38
post #36

After their disastrous license change and the reasons for it I figure their biggest Exit Plan would include being acquired. I made a couple of Option calls based on this. Monday could be good.

Imho, the license change didn't cause this. It was an attempt to make money. At that point they were already in trouble.

You'd be hard pressed to see this trouble in their quarterly reports.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#39

Devtools is a hard sell but not impossible. Unfortunately Hashicorp didn't even try. The reason selling devtools is hard is there's generally no established budget to sell into. I already have budget for various things - a vendor comes to me and tries to sell their product/tool/saas I'm looking what I can move around to afford it. If yours does a better job of something I'm already paying for, then it's the easiest s…

Companies have moved off PagerDuty? To where?

As of very recently, incident.io looks like a very attractive alternative.

Re: Software Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale

#40

Devtools is a hard sell but not impossible. Unfortunately Hashicorp didn't even try. The reason selling devtools is hard is there's generally no established budget to sell into. I already have budget for various things - a vendor comes to me and tries to sell their product/tool/saas I'm looking what I can move around to afford it. If yours does a better job of something I'm already paying for, then it's the easiest s…

As someone who is about to launch my SAAS, what are some of the things you look for, as someone with purchase authority? What are the positives or negatives you see when dealing with vendors (i.e. what makes you lean towards or against dealing with a vendor)? I'm trying to figure out how I can make the process as easy as possible for exactly people in your position.

I'm not the person you've asked, but I'm somebody who has been purchasing SaaS/software for businesses large and small for years. My take:

1. If SSO and other basic modern security features are locked into "Enterprise" pricing tiers then the service is at the bottom of the list (see: https://sso.tax). I'd love to say instant disqualification but too many SaaS companies have it in their head that only wealthy enterprises use SSO, despite SSO platforms being widely available and some quite cheap to acquire and start using.

2. If I need to request a quote to start any kind of service to see what the product is about then I'm not likely to pursue it. Don't make me jump through hoops when I'm just trying to see if a product can fit my needs.

3. If license terms are too complex or easy to violate that's a hard pass. Infrastructure monitoring tools are a great example. The licensing is often per "device" or per monitored metric, and some vendors are very loose with their definition of "device". (Don't use LogicMonitor with k8s unless you like throwing money in the garbage can). Hard lessons learned.

4. If the only details I can find regarding how you secure your product are claims of SOC2 and ISO27001 certification then that's a very likely pass. Those controls are great to have, necessary even, but anyone who has had to work to meet those compliance objectives knows that they're much more about organization controls than they are product security. Give me an idea about how you protect data and whatnot on a security page somewhere, not an attestation that dev and prod are separate and you have logs.

On the side of the positives, outside of not hitting the negative marks, I value ease to work with, responsive and competent support, strong pre and post-sales solutions architecture and support/training (if the product is complex enough to warrant that), and supports SSO. I bring up SSO again because it's a hard requirement for SaaS purchases everywhere I go -- no SSO, no go. Social login is not a substitute and is highly undesired.

Hope this helps.

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