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> 4 meetings just to get a price! This is often a sign the vendor doesn't know how to price their product. It sounds to me like they didn't have any index of w

> 4 meetings just to get a price! This is often a sign the vendor doesn't know how to price their product. It sounds to me like they didn't have any index of where the lines really were - one line is price where the customer building it themselves ins the option. The other is the price too low we can't do the deal line. They were probably afraid to talk price because they were afraid to put the first number on the table. > We ended up building the software we needed in house for 25% of what it would have cost to license theirs. Not surprising. I've been in way too many of these kinds of meetings, both buying and selling. Now when I buy, I flat-out tell the sales rep: "We make software. One of your competitors is us building what you have. Give us a price that makes that option unattractive."

bradleyjg 5y ago
Do you put your A team on internal software? Are the support, documentation, and maintenance stories the same as they are for revenue software? Etc. Not that this can’t be done and done well, but just like running your own datacenter the idea looks much more attractive at the beginning than it does a year or three in.
devonkim 5y ago
Had a previous prospect with a large, well known software company that paid several times more per engineer than our own and somehow in the end they thought they could build and maintain the software for less than what we were charging (we didn’t even break into 7 figures annually at all). In the end they formed a team internally that was several times larger than ours when technically we met their stated capacity needs and for the foreseeable future. Last I heard 4 years later they were still building and operational using the same thing as what the vendor (my company) offered. Some companies really would rather pay many times more and take the hit financially because a culture of NIH is so prevalent and deep across the company that it’s considered a risk if the vendor can’t be pressured to be acquired.

bradleyjg 5y ago

Do you put your A team on internal software? Are the support, documentation, and maintenance stories the same as they are for revenue software? Etc. Not that this can’t be done and done well, but just like running your own datacenter the idea looks much more attractive at the beginning than it does a year or three in.

devonkim 5y ago

Had a previous prospect with a large, well known software company that paid several times more per engineer than our own and somehow in the end they thought they could build and maintain the software for less than what we were charging (we didn’t even break into 7 figures annually at all). In the end they formed a team internally that was several times larger than ours when technically we met their stated capacity needs and for the foreseeable future. Last I heard 4 years later they were still building and operational using the same thing as what the vendor (my company) offered. Some companies really would rather pay many times more and take the hit financially because a culture of NIH is so prevalent and deep across the company that it’s considered a risk if the vendor can’t be pressured to be acquired.