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The product is so good you found out about it from someone else and had to have it also... Kinda like docker or python or something. They actually had that when the first started.
> What's your ideal B2B sales strategy that would work for you? >> Kinda like docker or python or something There's a lesson here in the difficulty of selling to developers.
That is a curious KPI.
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A perennial topic at lots of IT/devops standups these days is how to get rid of SaaS overhead, so this isn't a sure thing either. Bottom line is that developers and IT pros are cheap. I know because I am one. We always try to find a way to not pay for things and especially to avoid any kind of lock-in. I'm allergic to anything proprietary or anything with a SaaS, which is ironic because that's one of our company's pr…
They’re cheap until the management realizes they just spent a year (so like $300k) educating their devops how cni works and they bounced to faang or some other startup so the project needs to be scrapped or restaffed again and started over. That’s where the services come in. Also yeah it’s well known ICs view saas as direct threat so everyone tries to skip them and go directly to KDM. That’s the reason nearly all ent…
Example: "John is a cheap bastard. He never spends any money or buys the cheapest options".
I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.
The issue here is the lack of appeal for investors, leading to a tenfold decrease in new cos. However, the startups that do launch are likely to be more sustainable
> and had more than doubled the number of new product logos in 2023 That is a curious KPI.
I feel like the next generation of this type of company is smaller consultancies that have awesome developers that build customer tooling on the side. But the main revenue driver is consultancy. Also it really feels like all the air has been let out of the docker/kubernetes/cloud-native balloon that was so popular in the late 2010s.
I've worked at a couple consultancies and they were always chasing after that recurring product revenue. I grew to believe that it isn't possible under that business model.
When you are running a consultancy you are in the business of marking up developer hours: find a client to sign a contract for $150 / hour and hire a consultant who will do the job for $100k/year salary. Then convince them to work as many hours as possible for their fixed salary, plus the carrot of a bonus payout every once in a while if everyone bills lots of hours.
Having that developer spend any time working on the company's product causes all sort of problems. The most immediate is the loss of revenue. But also now this employee might see working on the product as cutting into their bonus since they are billing less hours. Everyone wants some of the upside if the side product generates revenue but how do you split it between people who worked directly on the product and people who worked on paying client jobs to generate the revenue so the others could work on the product? It ends up causing a rift.
The other thing I've seen while working at small and even medium sized consultancies is that they end up dependent on one large customer who calls all the shots and takes up all the available time, or all "extra" time not being billed is used working on sales for the next contract. Either way there doesn't end up being much capacity to work on cool tooling.
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what is the idiomatic approach these days?
Cillium is probably the most rock solid option these days. They are still pumping out releases even though they had been recently sold to cisco
https://www.weave.works/ "Operate and Manage Kubernetes easily" / "GitOps Automation for Kubernetes Stacks"
Probably most popular thing they built was FluxCD if you are confused where you have heard their name before. Their company provided a ton of extra tooling and consulting around the product. Hopefully as FluxCD user, this doesn't impact the development of Flux.
In 2019, they announced they'd be "merging" with argocd[2]. It seems the merge never really took place, and after that they deprecated flux and announced flux2[3].
The sudden changes of course were a little confusing and perhaps not too well communicated.
1: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux 2: https://discuss.kubernetes.io/t/flux-cd-joins-forces-with-ar... 3: https://github.com/fluxcd/flux2