Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The salesman and the developer

swombat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 59 posts

Re: The salesman and the developer

#31

Post by mbell »

wglb wrote: post #20
marcusf wrote: post #2

The main problem is when you're going bear hunting and they bring back a stampede of wolves. Wholly impossible to kill with the gun you brought, but if you tweak it just a little, you can kill them as well. Then the next time it's a an antler, that you can't kill like that due to regulation, but with just a few tweaks again. Great sales people are a game changer. People that can sell your vision and convince the audi…

How exactly do you tweak a gun? And what sort of gun that will kill bears ain't gonna kill a wolf? And I am not sure that wolves stampede.

> How exactly do you tweak a gun? And what sort of gun that will kill bears ain't gonna kill a wolf?

Simple example: there are a number of guns that can be converted from semi-automatic to full-automatic with very simple changes, removing a spring, filing something down, etc. If you've got a pack of wolves coming at you the rate of fire could certainly change the balance in your favor.

Re: The salesman and the developer

#32

Post by marcusf »

tluyben2 wrote: post #26
pudakai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One hallmark of the truly great sales person is that they can sell the product they have rather than the one they wish you had.

Where are those employed? I have never seen it; from small companies to MS (and especially Oracle), from services to product companies. They don't right-out lie because they've actually been drinking the kool-aid so they do not really know that actually the stuff they sell is hard (impossible) to produce. I'm talking software here; no clue :) about other branches of business.

I've worked with one or two of those (out of about something like a hundred, I'd guess). Both came from technology and had engineering degres but had figured out they preferred sales. I'm not sure that's the sole reason, but they really did grok how our solutions worked, what benefits they offered and how to map that to the customers desires and idiosyncrasies.

Re: The salesman and the developer

#33

Post by glanch »

dean wrote: post #29
tferris wrote: post #7

Another silly generalization of developers and business people (here called sales men). Maybe the drawn stereotype matches many folks out there but this view is aged and not valid anymore. Both the pure biz guy will die soon in the woods without any technical mindset and the dev will die soon when just waiting and hacking at the campfire. And together they won't be stronger. The picture the OP draws is from the past…

" Best proof is Instagram founder Kevin Systrom. " Ouch. I hope we're not going to start saying that the extent of Instagram's success was planned and inevitable due to the great founders. Let's be honest, it's a great app, but they won the lottery. It's not every day a super-rich guy decides he needs your app, and is willing to stunningly overpay for it. (I'm sure Instagram would have jumped at $50 million if it was…

You sure about that? Dude built an app that did photo sharing better than anyone else. Of course FB had to get their hands on it. That wasn't _just_ luck. That took vision, determination, execution.. and yes, _some_ luck.

Re: The salesman and the developer

#34

Post by IsaacL »

swombat wrote: post #23
IsaacL wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, couldn't agree more. I agree with the people that say that future generations will see Steve Jobs as revolutionary a businessman as Henry Ford. But this hagiography has got to stop. Let's put things in perspective. Steve Jobs made really good products that sold at a high-margin and made a lot of money. But hang on -- another way to see it is he focused on the features customers really did care about: nice UX, be…

I only ended up mentioning Steve Jobs because the Apple II came to mind as a piece of technology that was so awesome and beyond its time that it really ought to sell itself. It just so happens that Steve Jobs was the sales side of that business at the time (at least according to the biography). I tremendously respect what Jobs achieved, but I don't think I'm putting him on a pedestal. Are you guys suggesting I should…

Yep, fair point, your mentioning Steve Jobs made sense in the context of the article (good article by the way, I agree about engineers tending to undervalue decent sales guys). I don't know about babarock, but I was thinking more of the "10 business secrets of Steve Jobs" linkbaity articles you see floating around. Hence my pre-emptive apology for taking this comment thread off-topic. (I also think this is one issue with nested comments like this as opposed to traditional linear forums).

(IIRC the one time we spoke on Twitter I was also offering some vague criticism so I don't want you to think I'm some faceless internet critic. I'm actually a big fan of your blog).

Re: The salesman and the developer

#35

Post by sparknlaunch12 »

Enjoyed reading the story and appreciate the challenge to balance out sales and development. They are both important but need controls to ensure 1) money comes in and 2) you develop and focus on the right product.

The point that stood out was the final lines on the importance of sales. This almost promotes the mantra of building sales first, product second; and ensuring you are having money arriving in to pay the bills (and/or investors).

Having recently heard profitable entrepreneurs speak, the common story is how when they spoke with potential customers about their idea (even pre MVP) and customers paid them. Yes, paying customers suggest you are on to a smart product. Maybe some merit in this approach.

Re: The salesman and the developer

#36

Post by sparknlaunch12 »

Enjoyed reading the story and appreciate the challenge to balance out sales and development. They are both important but need controls to ensure 1) money comes in and 2) you develop and focus on the right product.

The point that stood out was the final lines on the importance of sales. This almost promotes the mantra of building sales first, product second; and ensuring you are having money arriving in to pay the bills (and/or investors).

Having recently heard profitable entrepreneurs speak, the common story is how when they spoke with potential customers about their idea (even pre MVP) and customers paid them. Yes, paying customers suggest you are on to a smart product. Maybe some merit in this approach.

Re: The salesman and the developer

#38

Post by swombat »

gaius wrote: post #28
swombat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how it makes sense to compare the Apple II to the C64... The C64 was released in 1982 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 ), a whole 5 years after the Apple II in 1977 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series ), so I damn well hope that it gave more bang for the buck.

Compare directly to the 64k IIe, then. $595 vs $1200, according to Wikipaedia. Anyway, my point is not to take anything away from Apple or Jobs, but it's a stretch to say that they were so far ahead of everyone else. If you need a hero for rhetorical purposes, try Jack Tramiel :-)

But I don't care about what was going on 5 years later. My point is that when the Apple II came out (not the IIe or the Mac or any other Apple product) they were miles ahead everyone else, and it was a product that in theory could have sold itself, but still needed a kick-ass salesperson to get off the ground. What happened years later is totally irrelevant to this point.
Post reply on HN