Can someone elaborate on "Backchannel.app" thing ?
Small Projects, Big Companies
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#22For #7 there is the great webmerge
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#23I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that. Solutions that sell upwards in an org (yammer for example) are very much the exception.
I would hope that making employees effective and efficient would be a selling point for executives. And the idea of charts and graphs shouldn't just be for execs.
If someone wants to really optimize for exec only, just do it the old fashioned way and bribe them. That's probably cheaper than making functional software, right?
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#24> Legal-Doc-to-Google-Form
> Every founder goes through an identical process: downloading Microsoft Word, changing variables in a legal template, opening it in Preview, attaching their signature, and sending it over to the counterparty. Automate this process. Offer templates for common documents (company formation, SAFEs, etc). In time, you might become the store-of-record for company documents.
My friend was working on a product that does this called Formswift! I can upload a PDF, have it convert to a set of form fields, and email it out pretty quickly.
It's not the most glamorous-looking startup, but it works really well for the mom-and-pop small businesses that are their usual clientele.
Take a look: https://formswift.com/self-serve-builder
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#25We are building better zendesk here - https://provlem.com
Still, many to go, but we have started to build better zendesk already.
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#26> The golden dataset everyone wants is the org chart. Who reports to whom. Who is new. Who has been at the company for a while. Find a way to get this data and sell it to companies. I suspect you’ll have many takers. Please don’t. Please. Really. Please don’t. Training my users to fend off social engineering attacks is hard enough as is. Please don’t use your talents in this way.
This seems like a great example of how privacy risks result in conflicts between buyers and sellers. It doesn't seem very surprising that salespeople want it so badly, and also that organizations don't want them to have it.
Some parts of the org chart can be inferred from various public data. Is it any wonder that people want to scrape LinkedIn so much?
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#27I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that. Solutions that sell upwards in an org (yammer for example) are very much the exception.
I would hope that making employees effective and efficient would be a selling point for executives. And the idea of charts and graphs shouldn't just be for execs. If someone wants to really optimize for exec only, just do it the old fashioned way and bribe them. That's probably cheaper than making functional software, right?
You would hope, but that is a macro decision that rarely gets into the details of the tools themselves. I've been C level at two tech companies that both grossed more than 70m annually and served tens of thousands of customers. In all cases at both companies the decisions made on SW tools were about cost, ROI, ease of migration/implementation and what present pain the tool solved at the exec level. "Will our support people be more efficient with this tool" and similar questions never ever came up. We migrated from ZenDesk to ServiceNow for support ticketing and the decision mostly hinged on the integration with Salesforce and the TCO, not on the functionality of the tool itself.
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hope that making employees effective and efficient would be a selling point for executives. And the idea of charts and graphs shouldn't just be for execs. If someone wants to really optimize for exec only, just do it the old fashioned way and bribe them. That's probably cheaper than making functional software, right?
You would hope, but that is a macro decision that rarely gets into the details of the tools themselves. I've been C level at two tech companies that both grossed more than 70m annually and served tens of thousands of customers. In all cases at both companies the decisions made on SW tools were about cost, ROI, ease of migration/implementation and what present pain the tool solved at the exec level. "Will our support…
[deleted]
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is spot on. I'm working on a blog post about a superset of this: the product IS the go-to-market. Messaging, sales/marketing strategy, pricing are just as much The Product as any feature. Ideally you maximize value/experience for users while you figure out how to get execs to buy your thing, but the sad state of most B2B software is a testament to how insanely hard it is to be good at both.
Can you post a link to your blog ?
Re: Small Projects, Big Companies
#30I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that. Solutions that sell upwards in an org (yammer for example) are very much the exception.
It’s not selling to executives vs users. Good sales process targets both - with different messages.