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PagerDuty engineer here. PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. You are correct that there are free products that can schedule people and send them messages, an

by a4isms 4y ago

PagerDuty engineer here. PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. You are correct that there are free products that can schedule people and send them messages, and with some elegant baling wire and duct tape, anyone can put together something that looks like a notification service. But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? It's not like they don't evaluate 2-3 products before choosing PD. They are choosing to pay more, so there's more to their decision than just "What's the cheapest way to notify people when we get a signal from monitoring that something's amiss." PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. And wrapped around that are layers of what pg called "muck," functionality that accommodates the needs of enterprise-grade customers like permissions, integrations, teams, analytics, AIOps for filtering noise and resolving things that don't require human intervention and so on. That's not special, it's how all "Enterprise" software works. At its core is something that people on HN will regularly boast they could code up in a weekend, a long weekend at most, and they're not wrong. But wrapped around that simple core are layers of functionality that accommodate how large companies manage the activity mediated by that core. I don't want to spark a long debate about PD's value, I urge you to see this as a pattern that applies to a lot of software that is sold B2B: The value is in the stuff around what appears to be the primary value proposition. If HN readers want to get into the Enterprise software business, embracing that pattern is mandatory: You will generate most of your economic value by taking an idea that at its core isn't that hard to duplicate, but wrapping it in accommodations for the baroque and sometimes-dystopian org structures you sell into.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
And this is exactly why we don't have flying cars yet. What a racket.
- schrodinger 4y ago
  We could easily have flying cars now but they're incredibly less efficient and roads work pretty well so where's the demand? Would you honestly buy one?
Dylan16807 4y ago
> PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. > PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. This is a good argument. > But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? This is not a good argument. Businesses make tons of non-optimal purchases. Research is hard, and salespeople are convincing (and might be talking to a different group than the actual users).
- a4isms 4y ago
  We'll have to agree to disagree about non-optimal purchases. Lots of purchases are non-optimal, but how often do people climb onto their soapbox and say that everyone buying Apple hardware is making a "non-optimal" purchase? At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." A better characterization is that "optimal" often looks different for an enterprise than it does for an SMB than it does for a startup than it does for a consumer, and within each of these segments there are sub-segments with different definitions of "optimal." I am not saying that buying PD or any other enterprise product is always optimal, but at the same time, I am saying that it cannot be dismissed as some kind of reality-distortion field that mesmerizes customers into overpaying. --- But again, whether PD is overpriced or not is far less interesting on HN than understanding what goes into a successful "enterprise" SaaS product for those startups who are directly pursing enterprise customers or may need to pivot from another market to enterprise. It's not just hiring convincing salespeople to sell the easily replicable obvious value proposition, it's actually all that stuff wrapped around it.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." Sure I can. Oracle is awful.
deathanatos 4y ago
This post makes me want to check out your competitors. (Unfortunately, I know one of them, and I like y'all better than them.) Yes … when the sales are wheeled and dealed there's enough Enterprise-grade bullshit shoveled about for me to start a fertilizer business. But that's not a.) what I care about as an engineer who has to use PagerDuty, and b.) time and again, I think we see upstart competitors whose products is actually better than the dominant player finally get enough mindshare among actual users that the tide turns against the incumbent and "everybody uses $X" stops working. I don't have to "embrace the pattern" to understand how the game is played, and thus be able to successfully navigate the space. But boy oh boy would it be nice if that weren't necessary. It would be a better advertisement for PagerDuty if you were concerned about improving the product. (Or, at least feigned such, which is what many businesses seem to do.) And absolutely things are chosen by dart toss. PD has inertia: it's well known, and the product isn't terrible. And I don't know anything better yet — so I'd choose you again, but that "yet" is key to any future competitor. But people believe the marketing, and nobody does the research necessary prior to adoption: the research is, for these things, equal to the work of actually migrating onto the platform: it is only by migrating that you find out where you've made assumptions about how paging works that don't match PD's. Marketing pages are too shallow to discover such things.
- a4isms 4y ago
  I am not interested in defending or advertising the product or company. I am on Hacker News, a site for people interested in startups that serves as a something of a feeder for Ycombinator. My interest is in discussing the dynamics of making and selling enterprise software so that my fellow HNers and I gain more insight into what to build and how to sell it. At the risk of an appeal to authority, I have been in the enterprise technology business since the late 1980s. I have held position in sales and marketing before my current career in engineering. In engineering I have had roles on both the IC ladder (I am currently a Principal Engineer) and the management ladder (topping out as a Director of Engineering). I don't regard this as a game we play for the purpose of bamboozling stupid customers into overpaying for software. I think that's a remarkably poor perspective on how business works, very similar in my mind to calling all Apple users "fanbois." It's a way of dismissing a large and complex equation that encompasses complex organizations, individuals within those organizations, various tradeoffs and aggregations of value, and so on and so forth. Reducing it to a simplistic take that it's all about marketing bullshit is low-effort and contributes nothing to anyone who wants to enter this space or survive if the economics of what they build indicates--as it did with companies like DropBox and 1Password--that they need to pivot to enterprise. Everything you are saying that drips with contempt for enterprise SaaS business, is also expressing contempt for their customers. I do not hold our customers or those who buy from our competitors in contempt, I admire them all: They have built businesses that advance technology, grow our economies, and employ people (modulo the current climate for employment). If you want to model the world as companies picking products with a dart toss, that's your business. But I'm not dignifying your position, I think it is absolutely not a foundation for success selling into these markets.

by a4isms 4y ago

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

And this is exactly why we don't have flying cars yet. What a racket.

schrodinger 4y ago
We could easily have flying cars now but they're incredibly less efficient and roads work pretty well so where's the demand? Would you honestly buy one?

Dylan16807 4y ago

> PagerDuty is not a messaging platform. > PD is an enterprise-grade process augmentation and automation tool wrapped around notifying responders about incidents. This is a good argument. > But ask yourself this: PD has competitors that provide messaging and schedules and cost less than PD. So even if they aren't free, why are customers paying more for PD? This is not a good argument. Businesses make tons of non-optimal purchases. Research is hard, and salespeople are convincing (and might be talking to a different group than the actual users).

a4isms 4y ago
We'll have to agree to disagree about non-optimal purchases. Lots of purchases are non-optimal, but how often do people climb onto their soapbox and say that everyone buying Apple hardware is making a "non-optimal" purchase? At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." A better characterization is that "optimal" often looks different for an enterprise than it does for an SMB than it does for a startup than it does for a consumer, and within each of these segments there are sub-segments with different definitions of "optimal." I am not saying that buying PD or any other enterprise product is always optimal, but at the same time, I am saying that it cannot be dismissed as some kind of reality-distortion field that mesmerizes customers into overpaying. --- But again, whether PD is overpriced or not is far less interesting on HN than understanding what goes into a successful "enterprise" SaaS product for those startups who are directly pursing enterprise customers or may need to pivot from another market to enterprise. It's not just hiring convincing salespeople to sell the easily replicable obvious value proposition, it's actually all that stuff wrapped around it.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > At some point, you look at a company with a couple of hundred million or billion or couple of hundred billion in annual revenues, and you can't dismiss all of that revenue as "non-optimal." Sure I can. Oracle is awful.

deathanatos 4y ago

This post makes me want to check out your competitors. (Unfortunately, I know one of them, and I like y'all better than them.) Yes … when the sales are wheeled and dealed there's enough Enterprise-grade bullshit shoveled about for me to start a fertilizer business. But that's not a.) what I care about as an engineer who has to use PagerDuty, and b.) time and again, I think we see upstart competitors whose products is actually better than the dominant player finally get enough mindshare among actual users that the tide turns against the incumbent and "everybody uses $X" stops working. I don't have to "embrace the pattern" to understand how the game is played, and thus be able to successfully navigate the space. But boy oh boy would it be nice if that weren't necessary. It would be a better advertisement for PagerDuty if you were concerned about improving the product. (Or, at least feigned such, which is what many businesses seem to do.) And absolutely things are chosen by dart toss. PD has inertia: it's well known, and the product isn't terrible. And I don't know anything better yet — so I'd choose you again, but that "yet" is key to any future competitor. But people believe the marketing, and nobody does the research necessary prior to adoption: the research is, for these things, equal to the work of actually migrating onto the platform: it is only by migrating that you find out where you've made assumptions about how paging works that don't match PD's. Marketing pages are too shallow to discover such things.

a4isms 4y ago
I am not interested in defending or advertising the product or company. I am on Hacker News, a site for people interested in startups that serves as a something of a feeder for Ycombinator. My interest is in discussing the dynamics of making and selling enterprise software so that my fellow HNers and I gain more insight into what to build and how to sell it. At the risk of an appeal to authority, I have been in the enterprise technology business since the late 1980s. I have held position in sales and marketing before my current career in engineering. In engineering I have had roles on both the IC ladder (I am currently a Principal Engineer) and the management ladder (topping out as a Director of Engineering). I don't regard this as a game we play for the purpose of bamboozling stupid customers into overpaying for software. I think that's a remarkably poor perspective on how business works, very similar in my mind to calling all Apple users "fanbois." It's a way of dismissing a large and complex equation that encompasses complex organizations, individuals within those organizations, various tradeoffs and aggregations of value, and so on and so forth. Reducing it to a simplistic take that it's all about marketing bullshit is low-effort and contributes nothing to anyone who wants to enter this space or survive if the economics of what they build indicates--as it did with companies like DropBox and 1Password--that they need to pivot to enterprise. Everything you are saying that drips with contempt for enterprise SaaS business, is also expressing contempt for their customers. I do not hold our customers or those who buy from our competitors in contempt, I admire them all: They have built businesses that advance technology, grow our economies, and employ people (modulo the current climate for employment). If you want to model the world as companies picking products with a dart toss, that's your business. But I'm not dignifying your position, I think it is absolutely not a foundation for success selling into these markets.