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Sales mistakes that software engineers make

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Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#181

Post by tomhoward »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #175
slededit wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back and re-read the title, it's literally advice for Software Engineers.

Why do you think my comments did not already account for that? The article claims that software engineers make the mistake of building before they sell, and advises an aggressive form of selling before building instead. But that advice directly means to skip engineering due diligence (which very often requires building before you sell). It doesn’t matter if the person implementing the advice would be an engineer or a…

Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given.

Nobody reading this is building anything resembling a perpetual motion machine. Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine business process.

Your comment is plain old reductio ad absurdum. It’s not clever.

Writers are entitled to favor conciseness over having to pre-empt any fallacious dismissal they’ll get from whichever random person on the internet needs to entertain themselves that day.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#182

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

tomhoward wrote: post #181
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think my comments did not already account for that? The article claims that software engineers make the mistake of building before they sell, and advises an aggressive form of selling before building instead. But that advice directly means to skip engineering due diligence (which very often requires building before you sell). It doesn’t matter if the person implementing the advice would be an engineer or a…

Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given. Nobody reading this is building anything resembling a perpetual motion machine. Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine business process. Your comment is plain old reductio ad absurdum. It’s not clever.…

> “Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given.”

No, it is emphatically not a given. Not in the context of some new CRUD tool. Not in the context of latest & greatest self-driving cars. Absolutely not.

> “Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine business process.”

You’re just simply extremely wrong about this. Even internally to a large company you often have projects spun up for face detection, natural language processing, complex workflow management tools, adtech tools, embedded systems, robotics, medical devices, systems dealing with personally identifying information, and on and on.

Expand to include start-ups and the breadth and scope of products being developed grows dramatically.

All the time, across all of these situations, you face engineers, product managers, sales people, and many others, who over-promise on product offerings during initial stage sales piloting. It happens all. the. time. And one of the most serious drivers of this huge and risky oversight is a lack of investment in building parts of the product in advance of attempting to sell it, in order to acquire knowledge that you did not already have regarding the cost and blockers of the engineering implementation.

That you dismiss this as implausible by saying “confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is given” is nothing other than an indication you do not know what you’re talking about in this topic. I feel frustrated to receive such a rude comment that is self-evidently more focused on trying to undercut me, even mentioning wildly non sequitur things about concise writing as if it applied to the original article, than focused on the actual discussion of the thread.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#183

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #155
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you if we are talking about preliminary market research, which also usually involves components of research into the technical investment required. That said, the article of this post seems to emphatically say something different: that you should actively _sell_ before building. Not merely collect research, but to sell stuff you do not already have the capability to deliver, and then somehow back…

I guess the question is, are you building another CRUD/business workflow app? Or inventing self-driving car algorithms with a KITT AI? One is highly possible and likely, the other is not. Most ideas will be somewhere in between.

I’d say even for some new CRUD app, assumptions that it will be easy to build are so, so common, and the reality of most “super simple CRUD apps” is that the implementation is way harder than you thought, and selling advanced features before you definitively know how to build them is a big source of failure for seemingly straightforward products.

It’s very much sales hubris to ever believe you know how to build something you’ve never built before, even in cases when it might seemlike a minor variation of something you built before.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#184

Post by slededit »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #182
tomhoward wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given. Nobody reading this is building anything resembling a perpetual motion machine. Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine business process. Your comment is plain old reductio ad absurdum. It’s not clever.…

> “Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given.” No, it is emphatically not a given. Not in the context of some new CRUD tool. Not in the context of latest & greatest self-driving cars. Absolutely not. > “Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine bus…

Sure at a big company. But this advice is targeted to engineers who want to start their own company. Its unlikely they can even afford any of the layers of cruft you are talking about.

If this was advice for starting some new initiative at BigCorp I might agree with you.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#185

Post by tomhoward »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #182
tomhoward wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given. Nobody reading this is building anything resembling a perpetual motion machine. Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine business process. Your comment is plain old reductio ad absurdum. It’s not clever.…

> “Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given.” No, it is emphatically not a given. Not in the context of some new CRUD tool. Not in the context of latest & greatest self-driving cars. Absolutely not. > “Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine bus…

Everything you're saying is valid.

It just doesn't invalidate the point the article is making.

Your point - which I'll paraphrase as don't sell something you can't build - is valid and important.

The article's point - which may be paraphrased as don't build something you can't sell - is also valid and important.

Neither is more important than the other; like basically everything in business there is a tradeoff, and the ones who succeed will be the ones who get the tradeoff right.

But the author makes their point because they see too many people over-optimising on the "build first" approach and failing, when they might have avoided failure if they'd done a bit more "sell first" - or, as the article actually says, "talk to potential customers to properly understand what they want first".

You're getting frustrated (indeed, coming across as enraged) and resorting to strawman and absurdist arguments because you're incorrectly seeing the article as making an absolutist point, and then responding to it with your own opposing absolutist point. If you just approach the topic with appropriate nuance you'll save yourself the need to be frustrated.

Edit: changing implied quotes to be clear they're paraphrased.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#186

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

slededit wrote: post #184
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Having a high degree of confidence that you are capable of building what you are selling is a given.” No, it is emphatically not a given. Not in the context of some new CRUD tool. Not in the context of latest & greatest self-driving cars. Absolutely not. > “Pretty much everyone in this post’s intended audience is building some combination of a database and a bunch of web forms and tables to undertake a routine bus…

Sure at a big company. But this advice is targeted to engineers who want to start their own company. Its unlikely they can even afford any of the layers of cruft you are talking about. If this was advice for starting some new initiative at BigCorp I might agree with you.

The need to build before selling is more critical for start-ups or single person gigs or consulting, because in those situations you don’t have existing stable revenue streams to use to absorb financial or reputational losses that come from underestimating implementation time or cost and failing to deliver sales promises.

If it matters to build before selling in a mature company, it matters even more in a start-up / solo business / consulting feasibility discussion / etc.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#187

Post by avinium »

bambax wrote: post #24

> Sales Mistake #1 - Building Before you Start Selling (...) If you’re wrong, you’ll save time and money by not building something people don’t want. I fell into this trap often, so I know it well. The reason why we don't ask first is, we want to build something . Anything. If we're "wrong", we won't "save" time and money, we will delay the moment we start making, maybe indefinitely. What if we never find something p…

I don't entirely agree.

There's a weird/elusive balance you need to strike.

On the one hand, people like ideas, because it's easy enough to make something sound promising. "I like dogs, and Uber for dogs sounds awesome!".

It's not until your hand is out and you're asking them to actually shell out for something here and now that you'll know their true purchasing behavior.

On the other hand, if you're really trying to push the envelope, they won't understand what you're selling until they see it. Imagine trying to sell the idea of a car to a buggy driver - they'll probably shut you down with "that will never work".

You have to straddle these two obstacles by getting to the "hand out asking for money" stage as quickly as possible, while highlighting that core novelty/innovation that makes you unique.

I agree with you that we tend to shy away from these "first encounter" moments because we're afraid to find out we sunk months (or even years) building something that nobody wants (or that they're not willing to pay enough for to sustain a business). It's easier to think that "just one more" UI/website/feature will be enough to make it "perfect".

Now, I'm a firm believer that the early product development stage is not about building a product, but rather uncovering information - who your customer is, how to reach them, and what they're willing to spend money on.

Most important is the discipline to maintain a rapid prototype/customer feedback/iteration loop.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#188

Post by sobani »

avinium wrote: post #187
bambax wrote: post #24

> Sales Mistake #1 - Building Before you Start Selling (...) If you’re wrong, you’ll save time and money by not building something people don’t want. I fell into this trap often, so I know it well. The reason why we don't ask first is, we want to build something . Anything. If we're "wrong", we won't "save" time and money, we will delay the moment we start making, maybe indefinitely. What if we never find something p…

I don't entirely agree. There's a weird/elusive balance you need to strike. On the one hand, people like ideas, because it's easy enough to make something sound promising. "I like dogs, and Uber for dogs sounds awesome!". It's not until your hand is out and you're asking them to actually shell out for something here and now that you'll know their true purchasing behavior. On the other hand, if you're really trying to…

> we tend to shy away from these "first encounter" moments because we're afraid to find out we sunk months (or even years) building something that nobody wants

I believe this is the key line in bambax' comment:

> The worst outcome is not to build something nobody wants -- it's not to build anything.

As a 'builder' I completely agree with that. I don't want to start an 'Uber for dogs' business, but I do want to make a woof recognition system.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#189

Post by sobani »

mygo wrote: post #179
djrogers wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be taking the term ‘selling’ too literally - it’s pitching an idea and soliciting feedback. If you’re taking orders for something that doesn’t exist yet, you’ve done it wrong. OTOH, if use the 3/12/24 months it takes to build the product to listen to future customers, you can ship something of value as soon as its ready.

Then every single Kickstarter is doing it wrong. Nothing wrong with taking orders for something that doesn’t exist, so long as you can deliver. The sales team’s problem is that they didn’t know what was technically feasible. There may have been a way to decipher whether what was promised was build-able... before trying to build it. And in any case, the point of collecting payment is to validate the market. No better…

Plenty of Kickstarters fail because the people creating the product realized too late how hard it was to create what they promised.

Re: Sales mistakes that software engineers make

#190

Post by sokoloff »

thrownblown wrote: post #177
dreix wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am poor therefore I write my own software.

I don't understand down votes. I often will see the price of an API (cough Google maps) and roll my own solution.

An independent developer capable of making a replacement for the entire Google maps API on their own probably isn’t likely to remain poor for long.
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