Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
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Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#2I agree with the point, but isn’t Jetbrains a good example of selling to developers?
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#3I agree with the point, but isn’t Jetbrains a good example of selling to developers?
If there was a way to get a company licence, I'd have bought it for our dev team.
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#4If your management doesn't get you the stuff you need to be productive your company is a failure. Move somewhere else.
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#5Nearly right. I don't think many sales and finance people have that kind of authority either. That's why you see everyone using the company tools or free tiers. You need to sell to peoples bosses. Save time, make projects more transparent, take away freedom, that sort of thing.
This is probably why Excel is so ubiquitous. Also that Excel is the most powerful tool that Corporate IT will let you have. Try and get Corporate IT to let you have WSL on your machine if you work in sales or Finance. That is probably why web apps are so popular. Corporate IT have to know about it to block you. A marketing manager can probably put Basecamp on her credit card, but it would be a huge job to get anything self hosted last IT with their policy of 'we are in charge of the computers and we will decide how you run your business'.
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#6Hence the common strategy to onboard companies when the company is still small (when developers either have purchasing authority or sit in a room with somebody who has) and try to lock them in forever
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#7I agree with the point, but isn’t Jetbrains a good example of selling to developers?
If there was a way to get a company licence, I'd have bought it for our dev team.
Er what? https://www.jetbrains.com/business/
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#8I always liked the Sublime Text model. You pay once, and keep your licence no matter where you work. Same with my keyboard. I like to own my tools.
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#9If you have to fight for a 50$ book, you‘re probably just at the wrong place.
That being said, some developers wanted to test Notion internally, so they got an informal account with a credit card. Turns out they built an important overview in it and send the link around, so everyone who wanted to take a look at it (half the company) implicitly created an account and our CFO got hit by a 10k bill next month.
And that‘s how devs having no purchase authority stories usually start...
Re: Problem with selling developer tools is that devs have no purchasing authority
#10Hasn’t this begun to change though? I did a brief stint at Sinch (the Swedish Twilio) and “developer go-to-market” was an established term there. My impression is that developers have started using so many cloud services and APIs that the old school approach (“nobody in engineering buys anything!”) is starting to crumble.