4 ms·
It just seems like the author is looking for a band-aid instead of the real problem; a heavily bureaucratic procurement system in their company. Sure, but as s
by dagw 6y ago
It just seems like the author is looking for a band-aid instead of the real problem; a heavily bureaucratic procurement system in their company.
Sure, but as someone who works at that sort of company, we happily give lots of real money to companies that solve that problem for us. As recently as a few month ago I wanted to spend 1-3 thousand dollars pr year on a SaaS product. The problem internally was never exactly how many thousands I was spending, but what the payment process looked like. And the sole reason I didn't give that money to the SaaS company was because they couldn't work with our procurement process. We're now investigating a much more expensive solution from a much bigger company.
I'm sure the SaaS company turning down our money was being rational and figure the cost of taking our money was higher than the profit they'd make from us, but there still seems to be money left on the table for someone to scoop up.
- grenoire 6y agoI bet they were rational, but somehow I can't imagine the lifetime value of you as their customer would overcome bending a little bit to suit your procurement needs. Odd.
- alangibson 6y agoIt's not a little bit. The process demands of a large company can suck the life out of a small one pretty easy. I've seen it happen.
- alangibson 6y ago> And the sole reason I didn't give that money to the SaaS company was because they couldn't work with our procurement process. We're now investigating a much more expensive solution from a much bigger company. Bingo. My guess is that it may be efficient for many small companies to offload the burden of dealing with procurement processes to a single specialized entity.
- coward8675309 6y agoI was CTO at a company that got bought by an enormous company with these sorts of procurement processes. I mused with my engineers multiple times about a company that would simply do billing process arbitrage.
- alangibson 6y agoYou've made me wonder if there's some way to arbitrage the billing itself so that neither party needs to pay anything.