11–20 of 348 posts
Wait, so are you telling me that in 3 years no one noticed that taxes weren't being deducted from their pay?
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've worked for have, too – sales people are very happy to overstate the available features and capabilities of any product. From their perspective, a shoddy, rushed implementation to an unhappy client is still better than having them walk away from the purchase entirely.
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me. Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've…
Question: Does your application has x, y and z feature and can be integrated in our process easily?
Answer: Sure, all there. Just have to tweak a few settings in the GUI.
Truth: We have a bare-bone product and a semi-documented API. Feel free to implement all the features you want and adapt it to your process. We can provide you professional services (for a price, of course).
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
At the company I work for, executives and sales people frequently make "commitments" to our customers for features that don't yet exist. People who make commitments on my behalf without even mentioning them to me beforehand (let alone asking me if what they're promising is even possible to deliver) don't get my full respect.
As advertised, it's not a self-aggrandizing "mistakes" post that points you at the end to the author's next venture. It's full of the kinds of things that keep me up at night.
It reminds me of something similar that happened to me: I was running Adwords for the first time. The dashboard wasn't showing that any of my ads had run, and it kept telling me to up my bid amount. I kept upping it and upping it, and I wasn't seeing any ads running. I said screw it and forgot about it.
When I happened to look at the dashboard 3 weeks later, I had blown $6k on Google ads. I had to get my team together and tell them what happened and apologize. ($6k was a lot of money to us.) Like Seth, this hurt a lot because I paid myself less than anyone in the company to save money.
Seth, if you're around the iDoneThis office at Great Jones and Bowery, hit me up. I'd love to buy you a drink.
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
This is incredibly common behaviour amongst sales people. Or what is also common is 'oh, funny you should mention that, we have a team working on that feature as we speak'. 90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.