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This is exactly why B2B startups should avoid chasing whales. Any customer that makes up more than 10% of your revenue is going to be able to demand things and

This is exactly why B2B startups should avoid chasing whales. Any customer that makes up more than 10% of your revenue is going to be able to demand things and get them; even if those things are not in the best interest of the product. Your sales people will want to chase whales if revenue is the only metric; so you have to focus them on volume. It's inevitable at some point; which is why most enterprise software companies end up as consulting companies after a certain scale. Consulting companies are ironically transforming themselves to be software companies as well, so competition is fierce.

jasode 9y ago
>which is why most enterprise software companies end up as consulting companies after a certain scale. Also, after growing to a big enough size, the software company can do "consulting" work without it hurting them. When Microsoft Windows NT first came out, I always thought it was strange that they had POSIX[1] support. There was no I company I knew that actually used POSIX apis. It was only several years later at a Microsoft conference where an employee mentioned that POSIX was there to satisfy some government checkboxes. By adding POSIX, Microsoft was able to sell a ton of Windows licenses to the government. Most other enterprise software companies don't get an obvious ROI like that for customer-specific features. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
angry_octet 9y ago
Sales people on commissions is a significant driver of this sort of behavior. It isn't neccessarily bad -- they are finding the path in feature space that maximises their revenue. But unfortunately what drives companies to buy isn't the same as what makes end users happy. I'm reminded that big or fast growing companies often totally ignore their users. (I'm thinking about you, Atlassian, with all your stupid emails about new features, while the bugs pile up, unanswered.) Even when there are thousands of seats, rarely do vendors actively engage users. Some companies, like MathWorks, do engage well, and I think that is because there are not large corporate buys, but many end users demanding it.
- ohnoesmyscv 9y ago
  it’s unacceptable to ignore users. At least respond and provide a timeline or a reasonable acknowledgement. Sure, your company might have big accounts thst need more attention, but if there are bugs piled up and feature requests left rotting on the shelf - HIRE.
  - angry_octet 9y ago
    I agree. But we pay them money whether they screw us over or not. Maybe companies should explicitly price features and bugs in maintenance quotes? - Base licence $2000 - Feature X - $100 - Fix bug Y - $200 At least it would be clear who has the money to back up their talk. But then would you expect to get the features and bug fixes you hadn't paid for? (Certainly for MATLAB they know how much money people will pay for each toolbox. But of course Sales then focuses only on the new toolboxes...) I don't think hiring is Atlassian's problem, they have a huge team. Maybe the problems are sitting in the too hard basket. But I don't think so. I think someone decided features=growth and time spend fixing bugs was wasted time. So they are always about the features for the customer they don't have yet, not the ones they do. (And they continually screw their third party plugin developers by implementing popular features in the core. Admittedly, generally better integrated and with saner pricing, but eating their young nonetheless.) The Wilt Chamberlain school of software product development. (I'm not talking about bugs only I care about -- some of these have thousands of customers demanding a response.)
ohnoesmyscv 9y ago
I dont think it’s impossible to both chase whales as well as satisfying pools of smaller fish. It’s often hard to tell a whale ‘no’ so your team can work on smaller pressing issues for some smaller customers, but there just needs to be a balance and discipline on doing that. How you say no is also extremely important :)

jasode 9y ago

>which is why most enterprise software companies end up as consulting companies after a certain scale. Also, after growing to a big enough size, the software company can do "consulting" work without it hurting them. When Microsoft Windows NT first came out, I always thought it was strange that they had POSIX[1] support. There was no I company I knew that actually used POSIX apis. It was only several years later at a Microsoft conference where an employee mentioned that POSIX was there to satisfy some government checkboxes. By adding POSIX, Microsoft was able to sell a ton of Windows licenses to the government. Most other enterprise software companies don't get an obvious ROI like that for customer-specific features. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

angry_octet 9y ago

Sales people on commissions is a significant driver of this sort of behavior. It isn't neccessarily bad -- they are finding the path in feature space that maximises their revenue. But unfortunately what drives companies to buy isn't the same as what makes end users happy. I'm reminded that big or fast growing companies often totally ignore their users. (I'm thinking about you, Atlassian, with all your stupid emails about new features, while the bugs pile up, unanswered.) Even when there are thousands of seats, rarely do vendors actively engage users. Some companies, like MathWorks, do engage well, and I think that is because there are not large corporate buys, but many end users demanding it.

ohnoesmyscv 9y ago
it’s unacceptable to ignore users. At least respond and provide a timeline or a reasonable acknowledgement. Sure, your company might have big accounts thst need more attention, but if there are bugs piled up and feature requests left rotting on the shelf - HIRE.
- angry_octet 9y ago
  I agree. But we pay them money whether they screw us over or not. Maybe companies should explicitly price features and bugs in maintenance quotes? - Base licence $2000 - Feature X - $100 - Fix bug Y - $200 At least it would be clear who has the money to back up their talk. But then would you expect to get the features and bug fixes you hadn't paid for? (Certainly for MATLAB they know how much money people will pay for each toolbox. But of course Sales then focuses only on the new toolboxes...) I don't think hiring is Atlassian's problem, they have a huge team. Maybe the problems are sitting in the too hard basket. But I don't think so. I think someone decided features=growth and time spend fixing bugs was wasted time. So they are always about the features for the customer they don't have yet, not the ones they do. (And they continually screw their third party plugin developers by implementing popular features in the core. Admittedly, generally better integrated and with saner pricing, but eating their young nonetheless.) The Wilt Chamberlain school of software product development. (I'm not talking about bugs only I care about -- some of these have thousands of customers demanding a response.)

ohnoesmyscv 9y ago

I dont think it’s impossible to both chase whales as well as satisfying pools of smaller fish. It’s often hard to tell a whale ‘no’ so your team can work on smaller pressing issues for some smaller customers, but there just needs to be a balance and discipline on doing that. How you say no is also extremely important :)