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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

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.

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.