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You're a little company, now act like one

blog.asmartbear.com

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Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#41

Post by brk »

pxlpshr wrote: post #20
josefresco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years of 'collective' experience is the key word that needs to be there to make it (slightly) less of a complete bullshit line. But that's the least of the problem with false claims ...I recently met the owner of another local web firm who was telling people they've been 'in the business' for 30 years. I don't think I need to point out the error in math there.

Right, distinction is important. We use "combined experience" to call out the width of our expertise, not depth, on our publishing services page for mobile development. I think it helps reassure some prospectives that while young, we have a broad range of experience in multiple industries. Getting sign off on a ~5-6+ digit services project takes a fair amount of work, and more so without a thick portfolio. Vertical s…

helps reassure some prospectives

In reality I don't think it works as you expect. Most people have come to see these "collective experience" lines as excuses for not having anyone on the team with more than a few years of experience.

Would YOU want to get a heart transplant from 5 medical students with "10 years of collective experience"? The reality is that this collective experience is not really additive. If you have 1 person with 20 years of experience in some area, they've seen a couple of cycles and progressions of technology. No amount of people with 3 years of recent experience can ever really match this.

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#42

Post by tptacek »

sh1mmer wrote: post #33
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's sad about this comment is that it's dominating the HN comment view on this article, and has nothing to do with the article.

Sorry about that. Not my intent. I actually upvoted the article because I did really enjoy it.

Not your fault.

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#44

Post by LogicHoleFlaw »

patio11 wrote: post #19
there wrote: post #13

i think it's certainly possible to make your company's image look professional without all the corporate speak, buzzwords, and stock images. my company is mostly just me (unless i sub out parts of a project) and i usually use "we" when talking to customers. many of them know the company is just me but they are already my customers. a potential customer might not even consider calling me in the first place if my websi…

I think the choice of "we" versus "I" is bicycle shedding for copywriting. I've seen software developers paralyzed by this decision. (No, really. It used to come up with some regularity at the Business of Software boards.) They've both got merits -- pick whichever sounds good to you and get back to stuff which matters.

Perhaps We shall settle upon the Imperial We in the future.

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#45

Post by jodrellblank »

brk wrote: post #41
pxlpshr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, distinction is important. We use "combined experience" to call out the width of our expertise, not depth, on our publishing services page for mobile development. I think it helps reassure some prospectives that while young, we have a broad range of experience in multiple industries. Getting sign off on a ~5-6+ digit services project takes a fair amount of work, and more so without a thick portfolio. Vertical s…

helps reassure some prospectives In reality I don't think it works as you expect. Most people have come to see these "collective experience" lines as excuses for not having anyone on the team with more than a few years of experience. Would YOU want to get a heart transplant from 5 medical students with "10 years of collective experience"? The reality is that this collective experience is not really additive. If you h…

Do you see it as an excuse for not having someone with 20 years of experience, or as a way to distinguish from a company with no experience?

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#46

Post by pxlpshr »

brk wrote: post #41
pxlpshr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, distinction is important. We use "combined experience" to call out the width of our expertise, not depth, on our publishing services page for mobile development. I think it helps reassure some prospectives that while young, we have a broad range of experience in multiple industries. Getting sign off on a ~5-6+ digit services project takes a fair amount of work, and more so without a thick portfolio. Vertical s…

helps reassure some prospectives In reality I don't think it works as you expect. Most people have come to see these "collective experience" lines as excuses for not having anyone on the team with more than a few years of experience. Would YOU want to get a heart transplant from 5 medical students with "10 years of collective experience"? The reality is that this collective experience is not really additive. If you h…

The mobile software market is young (relative to it's tragic past) and we're a small shop of mashups => advertising/web/software engineering. I have roughly 10 years of experience but it's not about me, it's about us and when combined — we have a lot to offer as a young company that's trying to get off the ground.

I'm very transparent when communicating our strengths and weaknesses to make sure the project+expertise = good fit on both ends of the deal. I agree with your point about wisdom, but heart surgery is rather linear and you better be highly specialized in your trade for that line of work. :)

ps. It's not that I disagree with ASmartBear, I just feel the post is a bit generalized in its advice. Selling client services does not benefit from a prebuilt software product that can sell itself.

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#47

Post by dpcan »

As a developer, I have no problem buying development tools from one-man-shop / small company.

When it comes to software for my other business needs however, I wouldn't use a hosted SaaS service if I didn't think it was backed by a lot of people, has a lot of customers, and isn't going anywhere.

As a provider of hosted business tools, similar to the ones I wouldn't buy myself, I find that showing the small size of my company is a huge problem.

I'm actually finding that the customers that won't host their data with a small company would be more than happy to buy a version they could install on-site.

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#48

Post by whatusername »

Alex3917 wrote: post #23
sh1mmer wrote: post #8

A bit of meta-commenting but the "Welcome HN" banner which encourages us to upvote the story put me right off. I'll vote it up if I like it, not because you customized your site to "Welcome" me because I read HN.

For every 100 people who read HN, my guess is that 10 upvote stories and 1 comments. I bet that more than half of regular HN readers don't even know that the site is powered by voting despite the little arrows next to each story. If people knew to upvote stories they liked on their own then the average story would have something like 800 upvotes. I agree with what you're saying because if everyone did this it would b…

PG - I / We would love to see the engagement stats on here? Is that 1/10/100 rule valid?

I'd like to hope that it's greater than 50% of people who understand the voting concept, but it would be interesting to see the metrics.

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#49

Post by mattcrest »

patio11 wrote: post #14
tsestrich wrote: post #4

I love the advice given in this article. In working on putting together a little company of my own, I often find myself looking at what seems to be "accepted" and trying to steer in that direction. This creates a lot of fluff in my language and, honestly, I end up with something that I don't think I'd even be interested in trying. Keeping it simple and honest always sounded like a good idea, but the fact that people…

You want a simple recipe for eliminating fluff and connecting with your customers? Talk less about we/us/I and talk more about you/your. When you're talking about "we", you're almost certainly talking to hear yourself talk -- "We have an industry-leading solution with years of YOU DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS." When you're talking about "you", you're probably addressing the customers needs and ways to get those needs satisf…

The "we" line is used all over the place for web design shops. My question is does it become valid if you regularly use sub-contractors and/or interns?

I recently did a video interview with an Icelandic freelance web designer and just posted a small excerpt, of which the main topic was honesty and authenticity in business (he spoke specifically of the "we" talk).

Worth a look: http://www.designlitm.us/articles/honesty_and_authenticity/

Re: You're a little company, now act like one

#50

Post by sh1mmer »

rubinelli wrote: post #22

Putting aside the corpspeak fluff, I wonder if this advice is valid for SaaS as well. I understand managers won't feel nervous after buying a mockup or code review tool from a small supplier, but would they be as willing to put business-critical data into a small company's servers? Would you let a one-man shop run your CRM?

I think that depends how transparent you are on your business practices. Running anything on a single server is dumb, but if you are one man shop running on EC2 and you are clear about that I don't think it's a big deal.

Explain what you do, and why it's good. Explain how you've thought about BCP and making sure everything will stay up (essential for a service).

Companies routinely hire individual consultants at $2k/day and follow their advice. I don't think that trusting a well respected individual in the industry is so much the problem, as trusting someone who's capability is unknown.

If you show the capabilities of you and your systems up front, without BS, then people will take you on for projects that are appropriate to that level of risk. Which may be quite as much as you can handle.

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