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news.ycombinator.com/item - Cached - Annotated View

Joel Liu's personal annotations on this page

joel
Joel bookmarked on 2009-11-05
  • It doesn't have to be a network-effect business for customers to prefer the popular product as a "safe" choice.
  • This is one of the big reasons why a lot of software is priced low enough that someone can pay for it with a credit card, and lots of software priced over $50,000 but very little between those two numbers. Also once you go down the enterprise software route the quality of your sales process matters more than the quality of your software. A good read on that is http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0....
  • I did an internship at a largely sales-driven company (Everyone gets an email when someone closes a big sale), and it suuucked. Especially when everyone was really anxious and uneasy because Customer X wanted his bug fixes Right Now.

    Unfortunately, you attract top sales talent with big money, and they get lethargic if the big money doesn't come from commissions, and they tend to over-promise to make the sale. This can piss off the developers and makes it not "a place developers want to work". You definitely have to maintain a balance.

    The idea that comes immediately to mind is profit sharing. When Joe closes the big deal, everyone gets commission. Even if it's not a significant amount, it'll let your developers continue to feel valued.

    At least that'd make me happier

  • Just because their product doesn't have a strong effect, it doesn't mean their customer base doesn't.

    If ten times the number of people are raving over their competitor eventually, that'll have a big effect against them (or, at least, put them on the back foot).

This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 05 Nov 2009, by Joel Liu.

  • 05 Nov 09
    joel
    Joel Liu
    • It doesn't have to be a network-effect business for customers to prefer the popular product as a "safe" choice.
    • This is one of the big reasons why a lot of software is priced low enough that someone can pay for it with a credit card, and lots of software priced over $50,000 but very little between those two numbers. Also once you go down the enterprise software route the quality of your sales process matters more than the quality of your software. A good read on that is http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0....
    • 2 more annotations...