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You need to determine which type of customer you’re targeting. At the high end, some enterprise companies won’t blink at the prices you’re suggesting. However,
by PragmaticPulp 4y ago
You need to determine which type of customer you’re targeting.
At the high end, some enterprise companies won’t blink at the prices you’re suggesting. However, they will expect a level of customer support and service agreements that are going to make you work hard to deliver what they ask. You’re also going to need to be heavily involved in sales cycles and support, which will start costing you many, many hours just to get the sale.
Are you prepared to handle this and stay responsive? If not, you will have mixed results pushing high priced offerings, especially if they have deal-breaker limitations (like your 30 second test limit) that could saddle the customer with even more work to integrate and use your tool. You have to acknowledge that your service isn’t purely savings for the customer. It’s work to implement and maintain on their end, as well as handle billing and so on. You cannot make sweeping calculations about savings without ignoring the costs it brings to a company to add your tool.
On the other end of the spectrum, you could target the self-serve market with lower priced services. These offerings can get away with a “take it or leave it” type of service where customers are mostly on their own to evaluate, pay for, and self-support the software. If the tool is good, engineers will try to make it work. However, I suspect you’re massively overestimating the way that test times are a blocker for most engineer workflows. Even with long text suites, we don’t just sit and stare at the monitor while we wait. That’s time for responding to communications, checking other things, taking a short break and so on. You could have a hard time selling engineers on the idea that they can do more work and take fewer breaks while paying for the privilege. Choose your marketing angle wisely.
- punkpeye 4y agoJust to clarify, 30 second limitation is only in the context of 1 minute test-result guarantee. Tests can technically run indefinitely, though I want to design the business model in such a way that discourages the long individual tests, as it aligns the incentives of platform and the client.
- punkpeye 4y ago> However, I suspect you’re massively overestimating the way that test times are a blocker for most engineer workflows. Even with long text suites, we don’t just sit and stare at the monitor while we wait. That’s time for responding to communications, checking other things, taking a short break and so on. You could have a hard time selling engineers on the idea that they can do more work and take fewer breaks while paying for the privilege. Speaking from experience, my productivity is down by like 80% if I know that there is a test I am waiting to complete. I can do other things, but I will constantly switch back and forth to check on the progress. I know from talking with other engineers that they feel similar, esp. when flakky tests are involved. However, I get what you are staying. I will think how to position this in a more compelling way that cannot be easily challenged.
- idlehand 4y agoI agree. It's hard to work when you have a 10-minute test running, either I wait/do busywork, or I start doing something else and then I don't want to interrupt that line of work to context shift back to a failed test.