3 ms·

> It is just me - is that a red flag? Some people have asked me about my team and I told them it was just me. I got the feeling that it may have turned them off

> It is just me - is that a red flag? Some people have asked me about my team and I told them it was just me. I got the feeling that it may have turned them off because the conversation kind of ended right there. Solo people and even small teams are a huge risk to enterprises. They will have to dedicate time to negotiating with you and integrating your solution. If you just disappear after that, that's a huge problem for them. Fog Creek talked about this a long time ago, where they priced their B2B product just below the typical limit for an engineer to expense, so that engineers could just buy their product online with a credit card and expense it. Once you enter into vendor vetting, it will be really hard to get out of it.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Be aware that more and more large orgs will have policy around software and services procurement for any software that will run on or touch internal enterprise systems or data, particularly protected data, regardless of price. This isn't 2004 anymore and engineers or even managers cannot just expense software purchases. It's only gotten harder to deal with big enterprise as a small software or services supplier.
philsnow 3y ago
There's a pricing death valley in between "can be trivially expensed" and "needs to Go Through Purchasing"; there is a huge step function in the cost for you, the vendor, to sell into that enterprise that occurs right at that cutoff. "What costs? I sell bits over the internet, my marginal costs are zero!" I mean the cost of either your time managing an enterprise sales cycle yourself or hiring somebody to do it so you can actually work on your product, times many many potential clients (because most will fall out of the sales funnel, so you need to have lots in flight to get some in the door by the end of the month). It can be untenable to price a product anywhere between $500/mo (or whatever the cutoff is) and $20k/y.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Be aware that more and more large orgs will have policy around software and services procurement for any software that will run on or touch internal enterprise systems or data, particularly protected data, regardless of price. This isn't 2004 anymore and engineers or even managers cannot just expense software purchases. It's only gotten harder to deal with big enterprise as a small software or services supplier.

philsnow 3y ago

There's a pricing death valley in between "can be trivially expensed" and "needs to Go Through Purchasing"; there is a huge step function in the cost for you, the vendor, to sell into that enterprise that occurs right at that cutoff. "What costs? I sell bits over the internet, my marginal costs are zero!" I mean the cost of either your time managing an enterprise sales cycle yourself or hiring somebody to do it so you can actually work on your product, times many many potential clients (because most will fall out of the sales funnel, so you need to have lots in flight to get some in the door by the end of the month). It can be untenable to price a product anywhere between $500/mo (or whatever the cutoff is) and $20k/y.