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It's possible to put a price tag on a new SaaS feature. You can say "In one of my previous companies we implemented exports to CSV, Excel, PDF and our customers

It's possible to put a price tag on a new SaaS feature. You can say "In one of my previous companies we implemented exports to CSV, Excel, PDF and our customers loved it. We can offer that feature". You deliver it and they bump the price of their mid tier to $X + $3. Done!

e1g 7y ago
Let's try to price out couple features - 1. Spotify expects 2019 sales to grow by 20-30% but profitability is still MIA and their net loss will be $300M. Let's say they are thinking to add a feature to generate Excel extracts of your playlists. You are the product owner for the desktop app, and the senior developer calls a meeting to say they had done market research and 300 upvotes on /r/spotify say this is a good feature, and he's open to all reasonable rev-share offers to implement it. However, if the percentage is not reasonable, his team is not going to want to work on this feature. How do you negotiate? 2. Apple announced animoji as one of headline features for an iOS release. There was a group of designers and animators working on the Alien animoji. The Alian animjoi was used in an ad with Childish Gambino to promote the feature. iOS itself is free, but Apple makes money on hardware with TrueDepth cameras that make animojis possible. In the fiscal quarter following that iOS release, Apple scrapped together ~$10B in profit from iPhones. What portion of that should be assigned to the designer who used Illustrator to create assets for the Alien animoji, TrueDepth camera people, marketing team who worked on WWDC slides and TV ads, and celebrity team + lawyers who negotiated with Gambino?
- macando 7y ago
  Spotify and Apple are big, publicly traded companies. People working on their new features are seniors compensated well above 140k. In a small SaaS startup if you can design products and code your contribution can be measured in terms of money. The thing is this clashes with culture of most startups. In their eyes, commission based compensation is for sales people, not for engineers.
  - confusedapp 7y ago
    I do sales. I specifically ask for commission on enterprise sales I negotiate and sign, not for engineering features. I have contributed to sales in my last two roles and it is the reason that my comp was high.

e1g 7y ago

Let's try to price out couple features - 1. Spotify expects 2019 sales to grow by 20-30% but profitability is still MIA and their net loss will be $300M. Let's say they are thinking to add a feature to generate Excel extracts of your playlists. You are the product owner for the desktop app, and the senior developer calls a meeting to say they had done market research and 300 upvotes on /r/spotify say this is a good feature, and he's open to all reasonable rev-share offers to implement it. However, if the percentage is not reasonable, his team is not going to want to work on this feature. How do you negotiate? 2. Apple announced animoji as one of headline features for an iOS release. There was a group of designers and animators working on the Alien animoji. The Alian animjoi was used in an ad with Childish Gambino to promote the feature. iOS itself is free, but Apple makes money on hardware with TrueDepth cameras that make animojis possible. In the fiscal quarter following that iOS release, Apple scrapped together ~$10B in profit from iPhones. What portion of that should be assigned to the designer who used Illustrator to create assets for the Alien animoji, TrueDepth camera people, marketing team who worked on WWDC slides and TV ads, and celebrity team + lawyers who negotiated with Gambino?

macando 7y ago
Spotify and Apple are big, publicly traded companies. People working on their new features are seniors compensated well above 140k. In a small SaaS startup if you can design products and code your contribution can be measured in terms of money. The thing is this clashes with culture of most startups. In their eyes, commission based compensation is for sales people, not for engineers.
- confusedapp 7y ago
  I do sales. I specifically ask for commission on enterprise sales I negotiate and sign, not for engineering features. I have contributed to sales in my last two roles and it is the reason that my comp was high.