21–30 of 77 posts
A really level-headed take on what must have been a very tough experience. I'm reminded of the Star Trek TNG quote "It's possible to commit no mistakes and still lose that's not weakness, that's life."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me, that falls under one of the handful of reasons under (1). But yes, enterprise rollouts are just a different beast for any number of reasons (contracting, legal, compliance, industry certifications, security audits, etc.)
Perhaps under (1) as well but especially at large enterprises you will likely deal with internal politics in the potential customer organizations. If the right person likes your offering, that can grease a lot of skids. If they don't, or your internal champion isn't well liked, you will face difficulty. This is all entirely separate from whether your product objectively meets a need the customer has.
We talked to one potential customer and he told us that they had an internal team working on something similar and admitted that they were much further behind and the experience was nowhere near as good as ours.
I think that's why you need really warm intros at very high levels or you need industry gravitas to pull this off without a very, very hard grind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2) it addresses a key part of their workflow, but the primary process exists in some other system so they are not willing to add a new system, This cannot be overstated enough. If you are planning a B2B product, especially anything middleware-ish, not planning for this on your upfront is just begging for failure.
Yeah, there are so so many B2B products that don’t seem to realize being 10% to 20% better than the existing X in a large company is close to meaningless. In practice it has to be more like 200% better, at least, to be a viable competitor that has realistic prospects of being adopted.
As long as the cost is kinda spread out and not directly visible by management
So yeah just being 20% better doesn’t mean anything, because most big orgs are much more inefficient than that anyway, almost across the board
Watching the demo, it doesn't look like the kind of product that's really usable for anyone who doesn't know SQL. If you need to know SQL to fully appreciate the tool, you're not going to want the tool.
but we learn by doing and we learn only by failing, so this will look great on their resumes for future jobs and give them priceless knowledge for their future startups.
although i would argue that this american degeneration of business, where every paper company is a startup, and every startup needs investors to make the product or service, must die, so that we can have actually viable products and not waste developer hours on nonsense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, there are so so many B2B products that don’t seem to realize being 10% to 20% better than the existing X in a large company is close to meaningless. In practice it has to be more like 200% better, at least, to be a viable competitor that has realistic prospects of being adopted.
Yeah the way I think of it is that most big organizations are willing to burn the costs of a whole employee or a whole team to avoid adopting new/risky software As long as the cost is kinda spread out and not directly visible by management So yeah just being 20% better doesn’t mean anything, because most big orgs are much more inefficient than that anyway, almost across the board
Most younger folks wont have an experience of enterprisey stuff like remoting into a terminal server so that you could run a fat client in a shitty and slow network connection, or have the most awkward tech stack installed on your local computer.
Moving to "its just a website" was way more than a 200% improvement on many things, even with the tradeoffs that javascript gave, moving people to the next level of more streamlined workflows doesn't have nearly the sales pitch.
> Large companies didn’t want it enough to deal with our lack of “big company features” (enterprise SSO, compliance certifications... > We spent a bunch of time on multi-tenant infrastructure... I'm in a position where I talk to SaaS businesses all day about both of these. Probably over 1,000 at this point. We help a lot of these companies add the enterprise features they need, but it's often a shame to hear they're…
Doing B2B sales is a skill, doing B2B marketing is a skill, doing fundraising is a skill, managing R&D is a skill, customer relations, legal, compliance, etc. You can learn anything, but you cant learn everything.
If he had two founders, one from a sales background and one from R&D management while he was the product guy, I would wager his story would be different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 2) it addresses a key part of their workflow, but the primary process exists in some other system so they are not willing to add a new system, This cannot be overstated enough. If you are planning a B2B product, especially anything middleware-ish, not planning for this on your upfront is just begging for failure.
Yeah, there are so so many B2B products that don’t seem to realize being 10% to 20% better than the existing X in a large company is close to meaningless. In practice it has to be more like 200% better, at least, to be a viable competitor that has realistic prospects of being adopted.
> Large companies didn’t want it enough to deal with our lack of “big company features” (enterprise SSO, compliance certifications... > We spent a bunch of time on multi-tenant infrastructure... I'm in a position where I talk to SaaS businesses all day about both of these. Probably over 1,000 at this point. We help a lot of these companies add the enterprise features they need, but it's often a shame to hear they're…