5 ms·

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers'

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify your forms and workflows. It cost millions of dollars and years to roll out SAP at a factory. The software we were making was faster, could be rolled out in weeks, and was user-extensible. The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software. It was the end-users that demanded it, and ultimately, won us our contracts again and again. Performance and reliability matters! It let folks on site get more work done, faster, and with better reporting and insights than they had ever gotten with their bloated, slow, expensive, and difficult-to-use software from more "traditional" vendors. It was a neat experience.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
IT folks hated it? Or maybe just the bigwigs? You don’t say why but guessing because you innovated away their headcount.
- radicalbyte 4y ago
  I assume that they were having to do end-user support. I was working in IT at that time and recognise that reaction from IT.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Oh you just need to support this XYZ new database, our app doesn't have a way deploy with your deploy tools, doesn't have granular permissions levels (in a factory environment), etc. Why do you not want our tool? Also, we will silo away a bunch of data needed for an MRP/ERP system to be effective to our system outside the MRP/ERP system. Silly IT people, not understanding our work environment (even though you support every person on the factory floor and have to understand their job and workflow to do that, to the point your techs are better manufacturing engineers than our actual MEs).
    - rfrey 4y ago
      You sound like you're exhausted from dealing with people who are constantly doing end runs around your software. I can understand that. On the other hand, if everyone in your org outside of IT execs despise SAP -- and make no mistake, they do, every last one of them -- then maybe it would be productive to wonder why that is rather than blaming your idiot users.
raziel2p 4y ago
> The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software why?
- agentultra 4y ago
  I'm sure they had lots of reasons. I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time). From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because: - They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time - Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing software from a small shop they'd never heard of was risky - Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! - Support: they knew how to handle issues with SAP, user accounts, authentication, authorization, etc; integrating another piece in the mix across the entire company would be a whole project It was a fun call to sit in on.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    > Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was brought in at the last minute to try and get it all to work in an unreasonable time frame. And then IT was asked it integrate it in impossible ways. If another department brings IT in early, different story. I got in to IT to use technology to make people's lives easier, not to play with whatever the latest fad bullshit is or develop an inflated sense of self-worth. If some random nobody's software is going to do that at the cost of a minor annoyance to me, that's fine.
    - count 4y ago
      Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.
0xdeadbeefbabe 4y ago
Was it the German company SAP? How did the end-users even find your software especially when the IT folks hated it?
- agentultra 4y ago
  Our sales people had connections in the industry that led us into various "approved vendor" lists. This eventually allowed us to worm our way into getting demos with floor managers who could use some of their budget to buy our software. Word of mouth spread from there and within a couple of years we were driving their IT department up the wall. It was grass-roots and the end-users, the people on the floor doing the work, loved it so much that it spread.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    And probably broke their MRP/ERP systems. But the IT departments probably came up with workaround to get data out of the system and feed the ERP/MRP system just enough to keep things going but probably way less efficiently than they would have ultimately been if pain points would have been addressed in the existing system instead of the virus of your software injected inappropriately. And then you probably badmouthed the MRP/ERP system for it's failings (that were partly related to the damage done from using your system). Weak sauce man. In a different life I wrote best of breed department level software too but at least I very much understood why enterprise systems were preferred outside the department so that I COULD ADDRESS THAT CORE ISSUE THAT NEEDED TO BE ADDRESSED AS PART OF MY SOFTWARE. But yea, IT department bad, me good.
    - agentultra 4y ago
      Haha, yeah I get that. That's why I sat in on calls with their IT folks. We made it as easy as we could to get data back out of our system. We exported in a bunch of different formats and could integrate with several ERP/MRP/BI systems directly.
    - rfrey 4y ago
      No need for such a ridiculously aggressive response.
acomjean 4y ago
My first software job was doing custom lotus notes database applications. One of the ones I was working on was going to be overlapped by future SAP implementation.. my boss said do it, because it was so much cheaper and no one could say when or if the SAP would be installed. They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible. But it turns out when you build something that fulfills a business need and makes employees life’s easier they like it.. a lot. Even if it’s just a Lotus Notes database application. I even won a very minor award for that one.
- chii 4y ago
  > They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible. this is both an advantage of SAP (and realistically, the ERP industry), and a curse.
- TheCleric 4y ago
  As a fellow dev who got their start doing Lotus Notes work, I feel this comment on a deep level.
bob1029 4y ago
I've had similar experience working on a B2B product that we sell to financial institutions. As the end users got a taste for our UX, they began to threaten resignation if they had to go back to the old system. Word of mouth and human competition are a hell of a thing. Once a branch manager sees how efficiently someone across the street is running their business (which is effectively identical due to mountainous regulations), they will start doing our marketing for us. I feel like tuning software for the human factor is something that almost every MBA still misses to this day. Making "this software feels good to use" an explicit objective is clearly impossible. You have to want the experience to be good at a fundamental level. Its an ambient part of every item that merges. You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this.
- b112 4y ago
  You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this. So many miss this, and the big boys don't only miss the forest for the trees, they can't see the leaves either. Total, narrow, limited scope. Then big boys win by Hulk Smash. Startups win by leaves and forest.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    I think this is ultimately what won over our users and why they championed our product so hard. A manager at a factory would use their budget to buy our software off their approved vendors list, get it going in a couple of weeks, and within months they were among the top performing factories. As word spread and other sites adopted our product the same trend happened. And we cared deeply about the end users. One of the best things I did was get our development teams on-site with users. We had lunch with them, saw how they used our software, and took back tons of ideas for improvements and features that we released frequently and often. I got to know a number of our users on a first name basis and would use some of them to try out new features before we released them to the rest of our customers. It was awesome. SAP is still the 800lb gorilla and probably always will be. It was neat to work in an environment where we cared this deeply about our users that they fought to be able to use our software.
- 4y ago
alberth 4y ago
Off topic: I’ve been a DH customer since 2004 and love it because to me it’s the perfect PaaS. DH is way under appreciated by HN crowd. If you have any influence though, can you ask for the dedicated & vps offerings to get more love. Hardware is terribly out of date now (lack of nvme & modern proc). I realize DH needs to hit a price point & margin, so I’m not asking for latest gen hardware. Just hardware that isn’t a decade old :)
IIsi50MHz 4y ago
This seems…tangent with…my experience at another small company doing integrations with enterprise software like Sage. The various enterprise systems of course had their own reporting solutions, but customers preferred how ours let them build their own or request designs that they could modify using skills they already had: Excel and Windows.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

IT folks hated it? Or maybe just the bigwigs? You don’t say why but guessing because you innovated away their headcount.

radicalbyte 4y ago
I assume that they were having to do end-user support. I was working in IT at that time and recognise that reaction from IT.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Oh you just need to support this XYZ new database, our app doesn't have a way deploy with your deploy tools, doesn't have granular permissions levels (in a factory environment), etc. Why do you not want our tool? Also, we will silo away a bunch of data needed for an MRP/ERP system to be effective to our system outside the MRP/ERP system. Silly IT people, not understanding our work environment (even though you support every person on the factory floor and have to understand their job and workflow to do that, to the point your techs are better manufacturing engineers than our actual MEs).
  - rfrey 4y ago
    You sound like you're exhausted from dealing with people who are constantly doing end runs around your software. I can understand that. On the other hand, if everyone in your org outside of IT execs despise SAP -- and make no mistake, they do, every last one of them -- then maybe it would be productive to wonder why that is rather than blaming your idiot users.

raziel2p 4y ago

> The IT folks at said multinationals hated our software why?

agentultra 4y ago
I'm sure they had lots of reasons. I got to ghost on a sales call once with one of our customers (I was a lead developer at the time). From what I could tell their IT people didn't like our software because: - They were already in the middle of a multi-year roll-out of SAP, integrating our software was a wrinkle in a plan they'd been working on for a long time - Nobody got fired for choosing SAP, some saw choosing software from a small shop they'd never heard of was risky - Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! - Support: they knew how to handle issues with SAP, user accounts, authentication, authorization, etc; integrating another piece in the mix across the entire company would be a whole project It was a fun call to sit in on.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  > Annoyance: they were in charge of acquiring and rolling out the software the factories used! Why were the floor managers demanding that they integrate our software? What do they know about software, enterprise contract negotiation, etc!? How dare they! Ok, so this one I actually kind of agree with. Too many times I was in a position where a bunch of decisions were made about software or hardware, and then IT was brought in at the last minute to try and get it all to work in an unreasonable time frame. And then IT was asked it integrate it in impossible ways. If another department brings IT in early, different story. I got in to IT to use technology to make people's lives easier, not to play with whatever the latest fad bullshit is or develop an inflated sense of self-worth. If some random nobody's software is going to do that at the cost of a minor annoyance to me, that's fine.
  - count 4y ago
    Having worked both sides of this, it's generally the case that IT is absolutely terrible at their job that ends up with them getting called in late.

0xdeadbeefbabe 4y ago

Was it the German company SAP? How did the end-users even find your software especially when the IT folks hated it?

agentultra 4y ago
Our sales people had connections in the industry that led us into various "approved vendor" lists. This eventually allowed us to worm our way into getting demos with floor managers who could use some of their budget to buy our software. Word of mouth spread from there and within a couple of years we were driving their IT department up the wall. It was grass-roots and the end-users, the people on the floor doing the work, loved it so much that it spread.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  And probably broke their MRP/ERP systems. But the IT departments probably came up with workaround to get data out of the system and feed the ERP/MRP system just enough to keep things going but probably way less efficiently than they would have ultimately been if pain points would have been addressed in the existing system instead of the virus of your software injected inappropriately. And then you probably badmouthed the MRP/ERP system for it's failings (that were partly related to the damage done from using your system). Weak sauce man. In a different life I wrote best of breed department level software too but at least I very much understood why enterprise systems were preferred outside the department so that I COULD ADDRESS THAT CORE ISSUE THAT NEEDED TO BE ADDRESSED AS PART OF MY SOFTWARE. But yea, IT department bad, me good.
  - agentultra 4y ago
    Haha, yeah I get that. That's why I sat in on calls with their IT folks. We made it as easy as we could to get data back out of our system. We exported in a bunch of different formats and could integrate with several ERP/MRP/BI systems directly.
  - rfrey 4y ago
    No need for such a ridiculously aggressive response.

acomjean 4y ago

My first software job was doing custom lotus notes database applications. One of the ones I was working on was going to be overlapped by future SAP implementation.. my boss said do it, because it was so much cheaper and no one could say when or if the SAP would be installed. They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible. But it turns out when you build something that fulfills a business need and makes employees life’s easier they like it.. a lot. Even if it’s just a Lotus Notes database application. I even won a very minor award for that one.

chii 4y ago
> They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible. this is both an advantage of SAP (and realistically, the ERP industry), and a curse.
TheCleric 4y ago
As a fellow dev who got their start doing Lotus Notes work, I feel this comment on a deep level.

bob1029 4y ago

I've had similar experience working on a B2B product that we sell to financial institutions. As the end users got a taste for our UX, they began to threaten resignation if they had to go back to the old system. Word of mouth and human competition are a hell of a thing. Once a branch manager sees how efficiently someone across the street is running their business (which is effectively identical due to mountainous regulations), they will start doing our marketing for us. I feel like tuning software for the human factor is something that almost every MBA still misses to this day. Making "this software feels good to use" an explicit objective is clearly impossible. You have to want the experience to be good at a fundamental level. Its an ambient part of every item that merges. You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this.

b112 4y ago
You have to care about the product and customer very deeply to achieve this. So many miss this, and the big boys don't only miss the forest for the trees, they can't see the leaves either. Total, narrow, limited scope. Then big boys win by Hulk Smash. Startups win by leaves and forest.
- agentultra 4y ago
  I think this is ultimately what won over our users and why they championed our product so hard. A manager at a factory would use their budget to buy our software off their approved vendors list, get it going in a couple of weeks, and within months they were among the top performing factories. As word spread and other sites adopted our product the same trend happened. And we cared deeply about the end users. One of the best things I did was get our development teams on-site with users. We had lunch with them, saw how they used our software, and took back tons of ideas for improvements and features that we released frequently and often. I got to know a number of our users on a first name basis and would use some of them to try out new features before we released them to the rest of our customers. It was awesome. SAP is still the 800lb gorilla and probably always will be. It was neat to work in an environment where we cared this deeply about our users that they fought to be able to use our software.
4y ago

alberth 4y ago

Off topic: I’ve been a DH customer since 2004 and love it because to me it’s the perfect PaaS. DH is way under appreciated by HN crowd. If you have any influence though, can you ask for the dedicated & vps offerings to get more love. Hardware is terribly out of date now (lack of nvme & modern proc). I realize DH needs to hit a price point & margin, so I’m not asking for latest gen hardware. Just hardware that isn’t a decade old :)

IIsi50MHz 4y ago

This seems…tangent with…my experience at another small company doing integrations with enterprise software like Sage. The various enterprise systems of course had their own reporting solutions, but customers preferred how ours let them build their own or request designs that they could modify using skills they already had: Excel and Windows.