7 ms·

All this, as well as integrations: if a company is paying 100k for your software, they are going to expect it to integrate with their existing stuff in various

All this, as well as integrations: if a company is paying 100k for your software, they are going to expect it to integrate with their existing stuff in various ways and you've gotta support that, and a lot of times that involves hiring "integration engineers" to support that stuff while you (hopefully) build those things into a general purpose solution (which is more difficult than it sounds). A lot of times enterprise sales folks are not particularly technical, so they'll often request support from a sales engineering organization.

majormajor 9y ago
Integrations aren't just enterprise things, as well. Consider if you wanted to build a Spotify competitor. Disregarding the partner management/sales/distribution side of thing, but sticking solely to the tech: You have to be able to ingest content from all your partners. If a new song is supposed to go live exactly at midnight on a given day, you gotta be able to deliver that. Not just media, but also systems for ingesting, reviewing, and publishing the metadata, album art, etc. You have to run on a lot of devices. You need a desktop or web app, an iOS app, an Android app, a bunch of living room apps, Chromecast support... You have to be able to bill people. I'd suggest offloading as much of this as possible so you're not touching credit cards yourself, but then it's still integration work. And now you have paying customers so you're going to be expected to have good reliability and responsiveness to issues, and to build tooling for your customer support team. Paying customers and inventory - even digital inventory - make things turn into a lot more work quickly.