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The article buries the startup’s more fundamental flaw > Almost no SMB views contract management as an urgent problem. If you are a solving a problem your tar

The article buries the startup’s more fundamental flaw > Almost no SMB views contract management as an urgent problem. If you are a solving a problem your target market doesn’t care about, you’re not going to get adoption. This isn’t a product problem or a top-down vs bottom-up problem.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
It's not a flaw, it just means your target is bigger businesses (hence why he needed sales instead of marketing)
- icambron 4y ago
  Their whole thesis was that SMBs need contract management. That thesis appears to have been mistaken. So it’s certainly a flaw. Sure, you could fix it by creating a new thesis about a different market, building a product that addresses that market, and setting up the right GTM for it. But that’s a whole other business, and they explain well enough why it’s not one they want to do.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    I think the thesis was, that SMBs could benefit from contract management in the long term, but (and not initially understood) it was not an urgent problem in the short term. To get buy-in for a long term initiative, they'd need consultative sales at the executive/owner level of the businesss, but that would mean competing with established "enterprise" companies, who already are not selling to SMBs because software sold that way is too expensive for the SMB market.
    - icambron 4y ago
      By “thesis” I meant the thesis of the business, not of the article. The article said just what you said; my point is that another way to explain those dynamics is that you can’t sell software to SMBs if they don’t urgently need it. That’s because that logic about top-down sales is true regardless of what you’re selling. And that’s why the foreknowledge that SMBs don’t urgently need to solve a contract management problem is a huge red flag, ideally before you’ve written a line of code.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

It's not a flaw, it just means your target is bigger businesses (hence why he needed sales instead of marketing)

icambron 4y ago
Their whole thesis was that SMBs need contract management. That thesis appears to have been mistaken. So it’s certainly a flaw. Sure, you could fix it by creating a new thesis about a different market, building a product that addresses that market, and setting up the right GTM for it. But that’s a whole other business, and they explain well enough why it’s not one they want to do.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  I think the thesis was, that SMBs could benefit from contract management in the long term, but (and not initially understood) it was not an urgent problem in the short term. To get buy-in for a long term initiative, they'd need consultative sales at the executive/owner level of the businesss, but that would mean competing with established "enterprise" companies, who already are not selling to SMBs because software sold that way is too expensive for the SMB market.
  - icambron 4y ago
    By “thesis” I meant the thesis of the business, not of the article. The article said just what you said; my point is that another way to explain those dynamics is that you can’t sell software to SMBs if they don’t urgently need it. That’s because that logic about top-down sales is true regardless of what you’re selling. And that’s why the foreknowledge that SMBs don’t urgently need to solve a contract management problem is a huge red flag, ideally before you’ve written a line of code.