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Once upon a time when it was Fog Creek, no, no, no… I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I

• exclusiv 5y ago
  Product sells itself outside of enterprise though. I'm just saying that it is possible to have a product that sells itself, and reaches great success without having to have salespeople. Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself. But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything. You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.
  • kcplate 5y ago
    I think you have definitely proved me wrong with Trello. Upon reflection I have been on that platform since perhaps day one of its release (I was reading Joel on Software blog posts usually same day back then). I know for sure since the first month (Sept 2011 Trello tells me that) and I am pretty sure I have had a paid plan for nearly a decade, probably dating back to late 2012 when I authorized Zapier to connect to my boards for automation.