4 ms·

This makes sense. Given my experience in tech startup land, im going to take a stab at how this happens from inside the company. Lets say you are starting sn e

This makes sense. Given my experience in tech startup land, im going to take a stab at how this happens from inside the company. Lets say you are starting sn enterprise saas company, woohoo! You have your initial product and customers love it, yes! Things are starting to hum along nicely. Now your sales people are identiying new markets and saying “hey if we add feature x and y, we can make $x million more per year from x y and z clients”. At this critical juncture, managwment most likely approves and has UX involved, but adding the features will be the priority regardless. Theres no overrulin g UX voice that can say “no, dont build that feature because theres no way to maintain the delightful user experience” because MONEY IS ON THE TABLE! Execs got revenue goals to hit, sales people have revenue goals to hit, and this seems like a match made in heaven. Additionally, its important to point out that pioneering companies dont know all the end state user flows at the beginning so they are hacking along, reacting as they learn more about end customers. Now fast forward a decade. The software is bloated but has grown a lot. Users hate it. New startups look at your product, your end customers, and say “hey! We can do this more simply and steal their customers”. And they can, because they have the advantage of starting from the ground up, KNOWING THE CUSTOMERS and their workflows. So of course they can build a more efficient product because they have the clear end vision - your product, but with the bloat cut out. Your team has already done the hard work of identifying the best and largest customer use cases. So what’s the solution? Acquire these upstarts or make your company a platform. I dont what blackboard has done here but salesforce is still by far the largest game in town despite universal hate. Why? In large part due to the vast network of 3rd party developers who can configure salesforce to a customer’s complicated workflows. They’ve actually taken this problem (it’s complicated to use) and turned it into a retention feature. No wonder they have a giant skyscraper in san francisco.

vgetr 7y ago
This makes sense to me. Sometimes it’s not even about more money but existence entirely. Seeing as that VisiCalc was _the Spreadsheet_ up until Lotus came along and ate their lunch, it’s easy to see that sometimes features and other external forces may have more of an impact than the raw popularity of a product in the end.
dmix 7y ago
A lot of SaaS businesses aren’t really SaaS, they’re glorified custom development shops with a few high paying customers. That’s not a great business to run though as it’s very difficult to scale. Far too many fall into the trap of saying yes to the first BigCo that comes by early on because they need the $$. While they neglect every other niche and business where it could fit like a glove. Or more often doesn’t even bother legitimately testing it on the open market since their very limited programming time is spent serving BigCo and doing support. A lot of companies using SaaS have a bunch of different systems interconnected with Zapier or their own systems. Which IMO is far more like Unix than x product that turns into a full blown CRM, CMS, ERP etc tacked on top a niche product. Building highly customized software also generates tons of risk for smaller companies as it binds their entire revenue on the success of a small group of other companies who may die, switch core business, or get stolen away by a bigger enterprise software sales team. I’d much rather build a niche software product and instead of building a CRM on top just add every sort of API, webhook, Zapier, or direct integration. Or isolate them into separate products with shared authentication and logging systems.
- ibejoeb 7y ago
  > they’re glorified custom development shops with a few high paying customers That's true, but sort of necessarily so, though. How else do you build a product that meets such a broad set of needs? Someone's got to do the work. At some point, features are going to drop linearly.
  - lmm 7y ago
    A lot of the time the client would be better off buying actual custom software. It's very easy to end up with a SAP (say) "configuration" so complex that you'll spend more on maintenance than you would if it were a standalone program.
    - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
      That's very true but still, in my experience anyways, it's much easier (i.e. perceived as 'less risky') to buy SAP and attempt to roll it out than to convince others that custom software would be better. 'Custom' is scary in a way that 'customizable' isn't.
yashap 7y ago
This has been my experience too, but with a slight difference - the new feature is very often an ask from sales, who are trying to close either a big new sale, or a big renewal. The prospect/customer demands some obscure feature that like 1% of our users will use (at most), but they’re a big prospect/customer. Product/UX/dev push back, say we should be working on features, performance and reliability that will benefit most customers, but it’s hard to come up with the precise revenue impact of this. Sales are better at convincing execs, and “this will help us close a $1 mil/year deal” is very tangible, so the new feature gets built. This is kind of a symptom of “the buyer isn’t the user”, though. Often we build these features, then monitor usage, and the customer that demanded it doesn’t even use it! Or we build it, and it doesn’t matter, we still don’t close the sale. I think the core issue is “building for users” and “building to close specific sales” are often strongly at odds with one another, and most of the time “building to close specific sales” wins.
jimbokun 7y ago
"Theres no overrulin g UX voice that can say “no, dont build that feature because theres no way to maintain the delightful user experience”" This was arguably Steve Jobs key role at Apple.

vgetr 7y ago

This makes sense to me. Sometimes it’s not even about more money but existence entirely. Seeing as that VisiCalc was _the Spreadsheet_ up until Lotus came along and ate their lunch, it’s easy to see that sometimes features and other external forces may have more of an impact than the raw popularity of a product in the end.

dmix 7y ago

A lot of SaaS businesses aren’t really SaaS, they’re glorified custom development shops with a few high paying customers. That’s not a great business to run though as it’s very difficult to scale. Far too many fall into the trap of saying yes to the first BigCo that comes by early on because they need the $$. While they neglect every other niche and business where it could fit like a glove. Or more often doesn’t even bother legitimately testing it on the open market since their very limited programming time is spent serving BigCo and doing support. A lot of companies using SaaS have a bunch of different systems interconnected with Zapier or their own systems. Which IMO is far more like Unix than x product that turns into a full blown CRM, CMS, ERP etc tacked on top a niche product. Building highly customized software also generates tons of risk for smaller companies as it binds their entire revenue on the success of a small group of other companies who may die, switch core business, or get stolen away by a bigger enterprise software sales team. I’d much rather build a niche software product and instead of building a CRM on top just add every sort of API, webhook, Zapier, or direct integration. Or isolate them into separate products with shared authentication and logging systems.

ibejoeb 7y ago
> they’re glorified custom development shops with a few high paying customers That's true, but sort of necessarily so, though. How else do you build a product that meets such a broad set of needs? Someone's got to do the work. At some point, features are going to drop linearly.
- lmm 7y ago
  A lot of the time the client would be better off buying actual custom software. It's very easy to end up with a SAP (say) "configuration" so complex that you'll spend more on maintenance than you would if it were a standalone program.
  - aeorgnoieang 7y ago
    That's very true but still, in my experience anyways, it's much easier (i.e. perceived as 'less risky') to buy SAP and attempt to roll it out than to convince others that custom software would be better. 'Custom' is scary in a way that 'customizable' isn't.

yashap 7y ago

This has been my experience too, but with a slight difference - the new feature is very often an ask from sales, who are trying to close either a big new sale, or a big renewal. The prospect/customer demands some obscure feature that like 1% of our users will use (at most), but they’re a big prospect/customer. Product/UX/dev push back, say we should be working on features, performance and reliability that will benefit most customers, but it’s hard to come up with the precise revenue impact of this. Sales are better at convincing execs, and “this will help us close a $1 mil/year deal” is very tangible, so the new feature gets built. This is kind of a symptom of “the buyer isn’t the user”, though. Often we build these features, then monitor usage, and the customer that demanded it doesn’t even use it! Or we build it, and it doesn’t matter, we still don’t close the sale. I think the core issue is “building for users” and “building to close specific sales” are often strongly at odds with one another, and most of the time “building to close specific sales” wins.

jimbokun 7y ago

"Theres no overrulin g UX voice that can say “no, dont build that feature because theres no way to maintain the delightful user experience”" This was arguably Steve Jobs key role at Apple.