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Kudos on a magnificent post, and of course commiserations. One thing resonated strongly with me. When we started out many years ago someone said to me that the
by abraae 10y ago
Kudos on a magnificent post, and of course commiserations.
One thing resonated strongly with me. When we started out many years ago someone said to me that the worst market you could go after was to target developers. Case in point - every developer who's ever put up a web site has built or thought about building a CMS. There must be thousands upon thousands of them, virtually all with a price of $0. Who would want to sell a CMS product?
We heeded that advice and I often reflect on it during the sales process when we have the "lets just run your offering past the IT team" meeting. So often, the line of questioning from the smartypants dudes in the room is all about tripping us up, finding our weak spot (I'm a techy so I get it - I think like this myself).
The best you can normally come out of that meeting with is grudging acceptance from IT that a SaaS solution should be OK, given that the business is in a rush and all, and given that IT has other priorities. (To be fair its much less like this these days, but a few years ago this was the norm).
By contrast, showing your product to a business person is a breath of fresh air. They don't want to build it themselves, they don't really care what's under the bonnet, they just want good, quick solutions to their actual problems, so they can go home at night and sit down to Netflix. HR people (our target market) are even nicer.
What's more those business people want to pay for your solution. A quick way to kill the deal is to joyously tell them "its free!". They need to understand how you get your buck at the end of the day. They'll never buy until they understand that. And the best (because its the simplest) answer is "we've got the best product, so we charge good money for it".
- donmatito 10y agoThese anecdotes are gold
- cmdkeen 10y agoIT people try and "trip you up" because we've been burnt so many times in the past with systems that don't do what is promised by the sales people, don't integrate well and who stiff you during the implementation phase. HR people are some of the worst because everything is super secret and they don't want to get IT involved, then they go and buy a system that lets you insert a carriage return into the phone number field and produces CSV files that don't have primary keys for data extracts.
- sametmax 10y agoIt hurts because I lived it so many times. The "you can't understand", "it's complicated", "it's a HR thing" is such bullshit.
- abakker 10y agoEveryone walks on eggshells around HR for "compliance" stuff. Anecdotally, I've not see a whole lot of compliant practices in the stuff HR wants. The high end HR solutions tend to enforce it, but there are always amazingly bad home grown tools sitting around to allow you to "pull a list of all our employees and all our data to a CSV" and then you find out the person converted that CSV to a google doc...(I've not seen anything that combined all these steps exactly this way, but I've seen each of these steps. The more legacy the tools, the worse)
- mannykannot 10y agoAnd yet a bunch of them chose MongoDB (over something else, not just over RethinkDB.) Was there some point in time when it was the best option for a lot of people?
- tracker1 10y agoThey were a fairly early entry into modern document databases. They offer sharding/mirroring, and have a really simple, relatively nice interface. In the end, they're a good (enough) fit for a lot of use cases. While RethinkDB imho is absolutely better, market share entropy counts for a lot. ElasticSearch is a similar product in the end, with lower consistency guarantees, that is another good fit for a lot of use cases. Cassandra (C*) is also a good fit for similar use cases, though more difficult to work with, it's also more tune-able to specific needs. It really depends on what you need... Every non-sql database tends to sacrifice something for some performance gain... RethinkDB is as close as I've seen to one without sacrifice.
- patsplat 10y agoYes, there was a point it was clearly the best option. Qualitative it was easy to understand. The mongo Cli looked exactly like MySQL. And it's single node performance was decent. CouchDB was super slow. Cassandra was amazing but a bit confusing. MongoDB made sense and worked.