Earlier quoted context omitted.
The kind of products hidden behind sales calls are generally the sort where the opinion of IC-level tech staff is next to irrelevant. With these kinds of products, the purchase decision is being made at a group level, the contract sizes are large, and budgetary approvals are required. It’s a snowball the size of a house, and it started rolling down the mountain months (or years) before it got to your desk. Literally…
I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a “small/medium” startup can easily sign contracts for single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople really do care about commissions at those price points. A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software. Github and Slack are good examples of se…
Not really. Even if we keep the conversation in the realm of startups (which are not representative of anything other than chaos), ICs have essentially no ability to take unilateral financial risk. The Github “direct to developer” sales model worked for Github at that place and time, but even they make most of their money on custom contracts now.
You’re basically picking the (very) few services that are most likely to be acquired directly by end users. Slack is like an org-wide bike-shedding exercise, and Github is a developer tool. But once the org gets big enough, the contracts are all mediated by sales.
Outside of these few examples, SaaS software is almost universally sold to non-technical business leaders. Engineers have this weird, massive blind spot for the importance of sales, even if their own paycheck depends on it.