32 ms·

Dude. You seriously need to market an enterprise edition of this (offer support or something). It's a great idea with exceptional execution. At least half the c

by PeCaN 11y ago

Dude. You seriously need to market an enterprise edition of this (offer support or something). It's a great idea with exceptional execution. At least half the companies I work with (oil & gas companies—they are addicted to Excel like it's crack or something) would buy this for quite a bit if it were marketed at them.

anakic 11y ago
Thanks! Something like a site wide license? Any suggestions on a price point for this? I'm decent at development, but I'm a complete noob at marketing and business.
- PeCaN 11y ago
  Site-wide or per-seat, I'm not really sure which would be better. For the companies I work with, which are by-and-large pretty small, I think a per-seat license would be better (several of them only have 2-3 production analysts). You could do ~$600/head including support+updates for a year (might want to cap hours of support, however) pretty easily I think. I'm not any better at marketing, I just know a lot of people that would use this if it were pitched at them correctly. Unfortunately, most of sales involving enterprisey companies is in the pitch and not actually in the product.... Alternatively you could just get bought by Microsoft like that other guy mentioned. Best of luck!
  - anakic 11y ago
    Thanks! I haven't given too much thought to support, but it seems to be a recurring theme here. It's definitely something to think about.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  Yes, good idea. Put "call" in for the price for now and be prepared to negotiate. All the big companies think they're special and will want a "great deal." You can give all of them a great deal and at the same time find out what the market is willing to pay while not underselling.
  - anakic 11y ago
    Good point. I added that in the FAQ section in the Guide, but really it should also be on the pricing page. I'll add it.
- shocks 11y ago
  Just a thought, you may want to think about changing the name if you're going after enterprise. Feels a bit amateurish/not serious.
  - wyldfire 11y ago
    That's what I thought at first too, but I suspect it's too late and most companies won't care much. Key is to have an enterprise edition with a support agreement and a higher price (as identified elsewhere in this thread).
    - jcrawfordor 11y ago
      Ever since I saw an invoice for Good for Enterprise (office nickname: Good for Nothing) I've realized enterprise buyers aren't too worried about name.
  - anakic 11y ago
    Absolutely true. Having trouble coming up with a name. Open to ideas. Currently I'm thinking "Tabularity", I've bought the domain. Not 100% set on it, but I'm definitely set on changing the name.
    - pash 11y ago
      SQExcel? The domain sqexcel.com is available.
      - NKCSS 11y ago
        I'd advise against using the term 'excel' in the product, unless you use it as 'blah for Excel'.
    - utexaspunk 11y ago
      eQuery? xlsql? I dunno, but I agree that the name makes it a little bit harder to take seriously.
  - sremani 11y ago
- blangblang 11y ago
  Also consider a license like JetBrains old "personal purchase for professional use". I've carried Resharper around with me from employer to employer as my own "hammer" resulting in multiple new enterprise licenses when other people see me use it. I imagine this is exactly that kind of software. Scratching an itch the business doesn't yet realize is there.
  - ctiothy 11y ago
    I would also like this option. With JetBrains, as long as you yourself are paying for the license you can use the IDE at work. Your employer cannot reimburse you in any way for the license or else you have to get the full on commercial version. This is something I'd like to be able to purchase to toy around with at work, but not necessarily something I would want to try to get my employer to buy for me, especially so I could move around with it (and use it for personal projects as well). Maybe something cost-wise between the personal and commercial licenses?
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  I've been around the block in corporate. Here's a guidebook (sorry I can't spend more than 15 minutes on this) 1: Get insurance for your product. It will run really cheap for something low-risk like this. (Our firm pays less than 10 grand a year for General Liability, All-risk, and Professional Liability up to 10MM, which is more than good enough for nearly every company out there.) 2: Like Patrick said, the second you throw "HIPAA" compliance up there you have the ability to charge 10 (IME, more realistically, 25x -- but your expenditures increase as a result of that (incurred labor costs of additional support, etc)). At your 20 dollar price-point, you're undervaluing yourself by literally 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. Find an industry (say, that dude who mentioned oil, find out what regulatory institutions dominate), get vendor certified and insured and you're looking at Oracle-esque money + 30% maintenance fees per year + support fees + modification fees. Corporate sales is all about the steak and strippers (and nepotism) but it's wildly lucrative, even now when oil is trading at like 40/bbl due to SA flooding the hell out of the market. To put it in perspective, Parker hydraulic gear commands a 3 or 4x premium over other brands of nearly-comparable quality. It's a lot like medicine or finance, huge markups but huge barriers to entry re: regulatory certs/risks. I wouldn't sell a site license for the product itself (per actual site, not per corporation, that midtown Manhattan office is billed separately from the LA office) for less than low 6 figures. (Sales cycles are long and expensive, your net on that will probably be 30%, which is why Oracle is always pushing for you to go buy that RAC license, it's only 30% more!) 3: Along the veins of having industry compliance, obviously, offer support. Lets say you want to target the mid-market, Bob the engineer won't be able to do buy the software until his manager sees a support contract available. You're basically not going to maximize revenue targetting this demographic. Supports a must though. (Joel Spolsky factioned software sales off into the "under 1k, petty cash" and "above 100k, gotta take it to the board". Supports a must for either one, at 400 a seat or 400/k/year/seat) I'd target niche oil + board approval market with a relatively long sales cycle (especially if that other HN'er who mentioned oil can get you in for a round of golf with the CIO and give him the 30% rip or whatever's standard now in enterprise sales). 4: Just a note, I take things apart for fun and your product isn't well protected. I'm sure you know that since you left little fun notes around your code base (ps. I do snoop around, and I like you also! haha). Just another why targeting the "Oracle" demographic (where they literally give copies away with no license keys or anything to everyone on their website), and corporations comply with the fee policies because it's wiser to pay the fees now than have the BSA audit come in and have a 5x fine imposed. --- I made a really long post about here[1] re: medical hardware (another tightly regulated industry with high margins and a sales team that makes or breaks) -- the relevant information is in the last few paragraphs. There are also .NET licensing components if you make the (imo unwise) decision of targeting the mid-market, which uses USB keys + a network server to limit your trial functionality, but as I'm sure you know, the second those bits hit the hard-disk, someone like me is going to take Olly to it and have it smashed into pieces within a few hours to a few days. Those keys just keep the honest honest (i.e. a company might forget that their trial ran out, or the note to authorize the purchase didn't make it down to their AR/AP dept, etc). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543670
- dataminded 11y ago
  I'm a marketer :-) Also, I have purchased a non-trivial amount of BI, Analytics, and Marketing software at total contract values as high as $X00K. I suggest that you offer at least two tiers (personal/education and corporate). You can keep the personal tier low to drive adoption as part of your growth strategy and price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points. If it will increase productivity, just buy it. Lastly, consider an enterprise or site option for users with more than X licenses.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    >price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points Come work for government, then despair.
    - amaterasu 11y ago
      I used to work for a Japanese multinational making networking gear. Excel was part of the mandated SOE, and was used for everything (even unit testing frameworks in VBscript), so this would be a no brainer for their environment. The engineers would have difficulty getting this purchase through as it is too cheap for the enterprise version... In the accountant brain, cheap == a toy for a number of companies.
      - patates 11y ago
        I think the logic is like "they can't possibly support this product at this price point, we would rather depend on something which may be inferior but well-supported".
        tixocloud 11y ago
        Support is such a crucial point in enterprise software. The reason why they pay big bucks is they have someone to call when something goes wrong
jakobegger 11y ago
Or not. Selling to enterprise is very different from selling to individuals. If you enjoy networking and the process of selling, go for enterprise sales. If you prefer to just work on your project, you can make a decent amount of money from selling to individuals. I make around 10k a month from an SQL client app that is targeted at web developers, and I spend very little effort on sales.
- edwinnathaniel 11y ago
  I'm totally amazed by this (10k/month from postico, mac app only). What _is_ your selling point for postico? I'm genuinely curious since there are other SQL client apps out there that either: 1) free or 2) F/OSS or 3) cross-platforms. Granted they may not look as "beautiful" as yours but gosh... they work out of the box... Man I need to do more market research....
  - jakobegger 11y ago
    When you use an app professionally, it doesn't matter if it is free or if it costs $40. If it saves you one hour of work, it's worth the price. It also doesn't matter if the app is cross-platform. Most people use only a single platform, and it turns out that Macs are very popular among my target audience (web developers & data analysts). It also doesn't need to support a lot of features. I focussed on features that are important for web developers and data analysts, and I made sure they work really well. Yeah, pgAdmin has more admin features, but my users don't care about that. I discovered most of what I know of the market as I went along, by talking to customers. Nobody bought the early versions of my app; it took three years of iterating on customer feedback to get to 10k a month. Talking to (potential) customers is really important. In the beginning, I thought that DB admins would be my target audience. But from talking to people at pgConf, I discovered that most PostgreSQL admins don't care about GUIs, but web developers do. So that's where I put my focus. I think the most important choice I made in the beginning was to focus on PostgreSQL rather than MySQL. The latter might be 10x as popular, but PostgrSQL is gaining popularity and growing, and there's lots of interest in PostgreSQL -- perfect conditions for starting a business.
chaz6 11y ago
I can vouch for this! I bought a copy to use at home. Unfortunately my business suffers terribly from NIH syndrome, and everything has to be kept as simple as possible because everyone is supposed to be replaceable.
anakic 11y ago
Any chance you could send me your contact info?

by PeCaN 11y ago

anakic 11y ago

Thanks! Something like a site wide license? Any suggestions on a price point for this? I'm decent at development, but I'm a complete noob at marketing and business.

PeCaN 11y ago
Site-wide or per-seat, I'm not really sure which would be better. For the companies I work with, which are by-and-large pretty small, I think a per-seat license would be better (several of them only have 2-3 production analysts). You could do ~$600/head including support+updates for a year (might want to cap hours of support, however) pretty easily I think. I'm not any better at marketing, I just know a lot of people that would use this if it were pitched at them correctly. Unfortunately, most of sales involving enterprisey companies is in the pitch and not actually in the product.... Alternatively you could just get bought by Microsoft like that other guy mentioned. Best of luck!
- anakic 11y ago
  Thanks! I haven't given too much thought to support, but it seems to be a recurring theme here. It's definitely something to think about.
wyldfire 11y ago
Yes, good idea. Put "call" in for the price for now and be prepared to negotiate. All the big companies think they're special and will want a "great deal." You can give all of them a great deal and at the same time find out what the market is willing to pay while not underselling.
- anakic 11y ago
  Good point. I added that in the FAQ section in the Guide, but really it should also be on the pricing page. I'll add it.
shocks 11y ago
Just a thought, you may want to think about changing the name if you're going after enterprise. Feels a bit amateurish/not serious.
- wyldfire 11y ago
  That's what I thought at first too, but I suspect it's too late and most companies won't care much. Key is to have an enterprise edition with a support agreement and a higher price (as identified elsewhere in this thread).
  - jcrawfordor 11y ago
    Ever since I saw an invoice for Good for Enterprise (office nickname: Good for Nothing) I've realized enterprise buyers aren't too worried about name.
- anakic 11y ago
  Absolutely true. Having trouble coming up with a name. Open to ideas. Currently I'm thinking "Tabularity", I've bought the domain. Not 100% set on it, but I'm definitely set on changing the name.
  - pash 11y ago
    SQExcel? The domain sqexcel.com is available.
    - NKCSS 11y ago
      I'd advise against using the term 'excel' in the product, unless you use it as 'blah for Excel'.
  - utexaspunk 11y ago
    eQuery? xlsql? I dunno, but I agree that the name makes it a little bit harder to take seriously.
- sremani 11y ago
blangblang 11y ago
Also consider a license like JetBrains old "personal purchase for professional use". I've carried Resharper around with me from employer to employer as my own "hammer" resulting in multiple new enterprise licenses when other people see me use it. I imagine this is exactly that kind of software. Scratching an itch the business doesn't yet realize is there.
- ctiothy 11y ago
  I would also like this option. With JetBrains, as long as you yourself are paying for the license you can use the IDE at work. Your employer cannot reimburse you in any way for the license or else you have to get the full on commercial version. This is something I'd like to be able to purchase to toy around with at work, but not necessarily something I would want to try to get my employer to buy for me, especially so I could move around with it (and use it for personal projects as well). Maybe something cost-wise between the personal and commercial licenses?
iheartmemcache 11y ago
I've been around the block in corporate. Here's a guidebook (sorry I can't spend more than 15 minutes on this) 1: Get insurance for your product. It will run really cheap for something low-risk like this. (Our firm pays less than 10 grand a year for General Liability, All-risk, and Professional Liability up to 10MM, which is more than good enough for nearly every company out there.) 2: Like Patrick said, the second you throw "HIPAA" compliance up there you have the ability to charge 10 (IME, more realistically, 25x -- but your expenditures increase as a result of that (incurred labor costs of additional support, etc)). At your 20 dollar price-point, you're undervaluing yourself by literally 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. Find an industry (say, that dude who mentioned oil, find out what regulatory institutions dominate), get vendor certified and insured and you're looking at Oracle-esque money + 30% maintenance fees per year + support fees + modification fees. Corporate sales is all about the steak and strippers (and nepotism) but it's wildly lucrative, even now when oil is trading at like 40/bbl due to SA flooding the hell out of the market. To put it in perspective, Parker hydraulic gear commands a 3 or 4x premium over other brands of nearly-comparable quality. It's a lot like medicine or finance, huge markups but huge barriers to entry re: regulatory certs/risks. I wouldn't sell a site license for the product itself (per actual site, not per corporation, that midtown Manhattan office is billed separately from the LA office) for less than low 6 figures. (Sales cycles are long and expensive, your net on that will probably be 30%, which is why Oracle is always pushing for you to go buy that RAC license, it's only 30% more!) 3: Along the veins of having industry compliance, obviously, offer support. Lets say you want to target the mid-market, Bob the engineer won't be able to do buy the software until his manager sees a support contract available. You're basically not going to maximize revenue targetting this demographic. Supports a must though. (Joel Spolsky factioned software sales off into the "under 1k, petty cash" and "above 100k, gotta take it to the board". Supports a must for either one, at 400 a seat or 400/k/year/seat) I'd target niche oil + board approval market with a relatively long sales cycle (especially if that other HN'er who mentioned oil can get you in for a round of golf with the CIO and give him the 30% rip or whatever's standard now in enterprise sales). 4: Just a note, I take things apart for fun and your product isn't well protected. I'm sure you know that since you left little fun notes around your code base (ps. I do snoop around, and I like you also! haha). Just another why targeting the "Oracle" demographic (where they literally give copies away with no license keys or anything to everyone on their website), and corporations comply with the fee policies because it's wiser to pay the fees now than have the BSA audit come in and have a 5x fine imposed. --- I made a really long post about here[1] re: medical hardware (another tightly regulated industry with high margins and a sales team that makes or breaks) -- the relevant information is in the last few paragraphs. There are also .NET licensing components if you make the (imo unwise) decision of targeting the mid-market, which uses USB keys + a network server to limit your trial functionality, but as I'm sure you know, the second those bits hit the hard-disk, someone like me is going to take Olly to it and have it smashed into pieces within a few hours to a few days. Those keys just keep the honest honest (i.e. a company might forget that their trial ran out, or the note to authorize the purchase didn't make it down to their AR/AP dept, etc). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11543670
dataminded 11y ago
I'm a marketer :-) Also, I have purchased a non-trivial amount of BI, Analytics, and Marketing software at total contract values as high as $X00K. I suggest that you offer at least two tiers (personal/education and corporate). You can keep the personal tier low to drive adoption as part of your growth strategy and price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points. If it will increase productivity, just buy it. Lastly, consider an enterprise or site option for users with more than X licenses.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  >price your corporate license at $200-$600 per person per year. I have never been in a situation where there was even a need to discuss the cost of a tool at those price points Come work for government, then despair.
  - amaterasu 11y ago
    I used to work for a Japanese multinational making networking gear. Excel was part of the mandated SOE, and was used for everything (even unit testing frameworks in VBscript), so this would be a no brainer for their environment. The engineers would have difficulty getting this purchase through as it is too cheap for the enterprise version... In the accountant brain, cheap == a toy for a number of companies.
    - patates 11y ago
      I think the logic is like "they can't possibly support this product at this price point, we would rather depend on something which may be inferior but well-supported".
      - tixocloud 11y ago
        Support is such a crucial point in enterprise software. The reason why they pay big bucks is they have someone to call when something goes wrong

jakobegger 11y ago

Or not. Selling to enterprise is very different from selling to individuals. If you enjoy networking and the process of selling, go for enterprise sales. If you prefer to just work on your project, you can make a decent amount of money from selling to individuals. I make around 10k a month from an SQL client app that is targeted at web developers, and I spend very little effort on sales.

edwinnathaniel 11y ago
I'm totally amazed by this (10k/month from postico, mac app only). What _is_ your selling point for postico? I'm genuinely curious since there are other SQL client apps out there that either: 1) free or 2) F/OSS or 3) cross-platforms. Granted they may not look as "beautiful" as yours but gosh... they work out of the box... Man I need to do more market research....
- jakobegger 11y ago
  When you use an app professionally, it doesn't matter if it is free or if it costs $40. If it saves you one hour of work, it's worth the price. It also doesn't matter if the app is cross-platform. Most people use only a single platform, and it turns out that Macs are very popular among my target audience (web developers & data analysts). It also doesn't need to support a lot of features. I focussed on features that are important for web developers and data analysts, and I made sure they work really well. Yeah, pgAdmin has more admin features, but my users don't care about that. I discovered most of what I know of the market as I went along, by talking to customers. Nobody bought the early versions of my app; it took three years of iterating on customer feedback to get to 10k a month. Talking to (potential) customers is really important. In the beginning, I thought that DB admins would be my target audience. But from talking to people at pgConf, I discovered that most PostgreSQL admins don't care about GUIs, but web developers do. So that's where I put my focus. I think the most important choice I made in the beginning was to focus on PostgreSQL rather than MySQL. The latter might be 10x as popular, but PostgrSQL is gaining popularity and growing, and there's lots of interest in PostgreSQL -- perfect conditions for starting a business.

chaz6 11y ago

I can vouch for this! I bought a copy to use at home. Unfortunately my business suffers terribly from NIH syndrome, and everything has to be kept as simple as possible because everyone is supposed to be replaceable.

anakic 11y ago

Any chance you could send me your contact info?