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Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how y

Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what the enterprise license costs on the homepage. Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online. I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be. I wish I could use what this guy is selling.

paulg2222 2y ago
You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  Not the parent, but I love communication. I love being able to send a chat message to a teammember and get a response in an hour, or an email at 8pm and read the response next morning. What I hate is having to schedule calls for next Friday just to get a response to a basic question, or being dragged into pointless half an hour meeting just to say two sentences about what I'm doing today. But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
  - soco 2y ago
    They're maybe the same managers who love the RTO for the sake of RTO.
- acuozzo 2y ago
  > you seem to be communication-averse Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now. I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
  - soco 2y ago
    This might be the very reason they prefer to call you, to force you into rushed decisions. Because otherwise I can't imagine the reason for spending scheduling time and minutes (hours) of chitchat just to answer a couple of very basic and totally repeatable question.
    - rubslopes 2y ago
      I have the same problem as the parent comment, and over time, I learned that people would take advantage of it, just as you mentioned. So, I decided to make my default response to every offer: 'Let me think about it, and I'll call you back.' Sometimes I only ask for one hour, but I always need some time to think on my own about the opportunity and make a sensible decision. This habit has improved things a lot for me! Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.'
      - diggan 2y ago
        > Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.' Tip for unmarried people: You can still use the trick above, no one would know or even care :)
    - AlwaysRock 2y ago
      Yup. Used to do sales. People are make way better decisions async (over email) than in person or on a call. People feel pressure to say yes in the moment and then the cost of later saying no is much greater than it would have been to say no over email. The stress and all the negatives people are posting about here is the point. Before you demonize any company doing this... Know just about every company with a product has a sales team of some kind and they are all operating with similar models. You are being annoyed by some sales people while the sales people at your company are annoying someone else.
- adamc 2y ago
  Some of us are time-wasting averse. I am never going to recommend a product without a lot of answers, and it is never going to get green-lighted without my boss feeling confident of the answers. The faster I get the answers, the more likely we are to follow-up. When getting answers is like pulling teeth, other solutions get considered, including "develop something in-house".
- f1shy 2y ago
  I absolutely love communication, meeting people, etc. as far as it makes sense! Typically is much better written. Everything can be forwarded, is documented, no misunderstandings…
  - kaffekaka 2y ago
    I agree about everything you wrote except the misunderstandings. Written communication absolutely can and do give rise to misunderstandings.
    - f1shy 2y ago
      I doubted for a second, as I wrote that. Yes, written communication can lead to misunderstanding, but more often in chat. Mails are a little better in that regard in my experience. Because they are saved and seen by many people, is easier to analyze what has been said, context, etc. But in general I would say, both can generate misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle down.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  They're not communication-averse. They're just not stupid. The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available. This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- thayne 2y ago
  > Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway. That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
f1shy 2y ago
> Please explain clearly what your product does Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Yeah, product websites have turned into pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about Blogprexa!"
- Alex-Programs 2y ago
  I've been reading about landing pages for my project, and the standard formula is apparently to place that front-and-centre, with what your product actually does second. So often, though, it seems like they're so eager to tell you how brilliant the product is, they forget to tell you what it actually does. And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical). So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?". Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats. Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
  - chrisweekly 2y ago
    sure, features vs benefits reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and still no idea what the product is or how it's differentiated.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
> I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be. Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear. Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.
- karatinversion 2y ago
  > we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.
  - koolba 2y ago
    Sales has to be commission based and you always hire at least two salesman. The biggest driver to make a sale is the commission. The second biggest is fear of getting sacked because you’re not making as many sales as the other guy.
    - chuckadams 2y ago
      Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.
      - 2y ago
nebulous1 2y ago
But they say what they do on their product page. They provide a solution.
dyauspitr 2y ago
On the other hand, I would hate to wade through email chains, type out large emails and wait for delayed async responses drawn out over days. I thrive when I can read the documentation, come prepared to a call and have my questions answered quickly in real time. There’s also something about quickly parsing the realtime information that brings out the best and most relevant questions in me.
ikanreed 2y ago
A lot of companies don't actually sell a product that does anything useful, though. They sell an idea that sounds useful to management, and obscuring the truth earns more money.
- snacksmcgee 2y ago
  A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-funded forum: scummy garbage makes money. Taking sales people out for steak and whiskey makes money. Lying makes money. (That last point is especially funny considering how startups lie, too, like having a landing page and no product but collecting emails like you do.) The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
  - spenczar5 2y ago
    > The economy is built on grifting, at this point I agreed until here. Obviously, lying isn't the only way to make money. I make furniture and fix windows in old houses for a living. Am I grifting? When you stretch into hyperbole, you lose the ability to convince people in the middle.
    - calebio 2y ago
      It's not that hyperbolic. I'd say the economy isn't built on you making furniture and fixing windows in old houses for a living. Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on folks like you? No.
      - tomxor 2y ago
        > Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on folks like you? No. Are you sure? If you ignore human constructs such as companies and organisations and quantify based on classifications that make more sense for aggregates of workers, you might be surprised how little of the economy is built on the F500 let alone venture capital unicorns.
      - 2y ago
herpdyderp 2y ago
Ironically, I also actually can't figure out what this company does from its website.
- diggan 2y ago
  The title on the website says "licensing & distribution", the paragraph under that repeats it and the code example shows some software trying to authorize a serial key to see if it's valid or not. I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    It seems reasonably clear to me, yes - although "distribution" could mean a lot of things. As the documentation is all public, though, it's easy enough to see what they're offering.
- Arch-TK 2y ago
  Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).
  - cyral 2y ago
    Right, I thought it was extremely clear. The code sample on the homepage really makes it click right away for developers and confirm that it's what they need. While developers might not be the decision person, I bet they get a ton of leads from developers who find this company and then ask their management for it.
- rib3ye 2y ago
  Recently I have been dropping the URL in ChatGPT and asking what the company actually builds, problems they solve, and how they make money. Especially for consulting firms, they really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating what they actually do.
castillar76 2y ago
Even just the pricing component would be lovely — I'm so tired of the "call us to discuss license cost" for anything larger than "absurdly tiny". You don't need to make it penny-accurate, even: I just need a sense of scale. If your product costs something wildly outside my budget, wouldn't you rather save your time to talk with people that can actually afford what you're selling? (I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)
- dowager_dan99 2y ago
  I've seen (and experienced as the seller) 2 main reasons: 1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from every enterprise client 2. we don't actually know our own economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest effort to quote it within a magnitude A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal answers, more complex than just a formula...
  - castillar76 2y ago
    I could see that — having worked for a large network vendor in the past, there are some things that just don't lend themselves to any kind of pricing without some kind of scoping discussion. :) Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more companies think they have that problem than actually have that problem.
cyanydeez 2y ago
Its difficult because lying about "implementation details" is a marketing detail.
arisudesu 2y ago
May it happen that CloudFlare stops sending their call invitations to me. I have an account at them which has shared access to company domains, because sometimes I was needed to assist with them. CloudFlare reps repeatedly e-mail me to schedule a call, even after I replied to them and told that I am not a person directly responsible for our domains and asked to stop mailing me. Whoever was their rep at that time, answered that they will stop. Some time passed, and they started e-mailing again. Eventually I started putting their e-mails to spam folder.
retrochameleon 2y ago
I was in an email back and forth with someone that cold emailed us about a service. Sometimes, I say "what the hell" and take their pitch and see if it's actually worthwhile. But this guy, after I asked him some basic details about his service and what differentiates them, refused to answer my questions and insisted on getting on a call. Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.
RobinL 2y ago
Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because: - it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in) - it usually obscures what the product actually does Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more
- tashian 2y ago
  How should a company figure out what to charge for something in the first place? Especially a startup that doesn't have much market data to go on, and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of. When this is the case, one option is to do price discovery. And the way to do that is to remove prices from the website, take calls, learn about customers and their needs, and experiment.
  - earnestinger 2y ago
    If client pays for a link that’s part of a chain, and doesn’t want the chain broken, and still has profit, it means client can pay more, that link is worth more.
  - necovek 2y ago
    When you don't how valuable it's going to be, you at least know how expensive is it to make. For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top. If you can't figure that out either, well...
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of. How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with. -- [0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.
hathawsh 2y ago
People who behave this way are spammers and I mark their emails as spam. It's a small gesture, but it feels good to help identify the spammers.
mrandish 2y ago
> ... post that stuff online. > I do not understand why that's difficult It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me. After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about. Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.
blitzar 2y ago
Burt. This bloke won't haggle! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8

paulg2222 2y ago

You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.

poincaredisk 2y ago
Not the parent, but I love communication. I love being able to send a chat message to a teammember and get a response in an hour, or an email at 8pm and read the response next morning. What I hate is having to schedule calls for next Friday just to get a response to a basic question, or being dragged into pointless half an hour meeting just to say two sentences about what I'm doing today. But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
- soco 2y ago
  They're maybe the same managers who love the RTO for the sake of RTO.
acuozzo 2y ago
> you seem to be communication-averse Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now. I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
- soco 2y ago
  This might be the very reason they prefer to call you, to force you into rushed decisions. Because otherwise I can't imagine the reason for spending scheduling time and minutes (hours) of chitchat just to answer a couple of very basic and totally repeatable question.
  - rubslopes 2y ago
    I have the same problem as the parent comment, and over time, I learned that people would take advantage of it, just as you mentioned. So, I decided to make my default response to every offer: 'Let me think about it, and I'll call you back.' Sometimes I only ask for one hour, but I always need some time to think on my own about the opportunity and make a sensible decision. This habit has improved things a lot for me! Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.'
    - diggan 2y ago
      > Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.' Tip for unmarried people: You can still use the trick above, no one would know or even care :)
  - AlwaysRock 2y ago
    Yup. Used to do sales. People are make way better decisions async (over email) than in person or on a call. People feel pressure to say yes in the moment and then the cost of later saying no is much greater than it would have been to say no over email. The stress and all the negatives people are posting about here is the point. Before you demonize any company doing this... Know just about every company with a product has a sales team of some kind and they are all operating with similar models. You are being annoyed by some sales people while the sales people at your company are annoying someone else.
adamc 2y ago
Some of us are time-wasting averse. I am never going to recommend a product without a lot of answers, and it is never going to get green-lighted without my boss feeling confident of the answers. The faster I get the answers, the more likely we are to follow-up. When getting answers is like pulling teeth, other solutions get considered, including "develop something in-house".
f1shy 2y ago
I absolutely love communication, meeting people, etc. as far as it makes sense! Typically is much better written. Everything can be forwarded, is documented, no misunderstandings…
- kaffekaka 2y ago
  I agree about everything you wrote except the misunderstandings. Written communication absolutely can and do give rise to misunderstandings.
  - f1shy 2y ago
    I doubted for a second, as I wrote that. Yes, written communication can lead to misunderstanding, but more often in chat. Mails are a little better in that regard in my experience. Because they are saved and seen by many people, is easier to analyze what has been said, context, etc. But in general I would say, both can generate misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle down.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
They're not communication-averse. They're just not stupid. The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available. This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
thayne 2y ago
> Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway. That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.

f1shy 2y ago

> Please explain clearly what your product does Please please!!! I’m so tired of sites with promises “double your productivity” “never lose a file again” blabla… but they never say what the product is really.

ceejayoz 2y ago
Yeah, product websites have turned into pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about Blogprexa!"
Alex-Programs 2y ago
I've been reading about landing pages for my project, and the standard formula is apparently to place that front-and-centre, with what your product actually does second. So often, though, it seems like they're so eager to tell you how brilliant the product is, they forget to tell you what it actually does. And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical). So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?". Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats. Edit: I'm anecdotally noticing that the "Social proof!" (testimonials) I added yesterday seems to have hurt conversion if anything. I'm not convinced of the standard advice here... definitely worth getting some data on.
- chrisweekly 2y ago
  sure, features vs benefits reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and still no idea what the product is or how it's differentiated.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

> I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be. Because historically and even presently to a distressing degree, sales is not about communication, it's not amount mutuality of purpose, and it's not about explaining what the product is. If you have a product that does it's job and does it well, and solves a problem for a person or a business, you don't need a sales call because a sales email is more effective. You need a sales call (and arguably, a salesperson) when the value proposition isn't remotely that clear. Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission. I appreciate at my current employer that while we offer bonuses for sales folks that really go above an beyond, like scoring a large account or solving a large problem, we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries. That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.

karatinversion 2y ago
> we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.
- koolba 2y ago
  Sales has to be commission based and you always hire at least two salesman. The biggest driver to make a sale is the commission. The second biggest is fear of getting sacked because you’re not making as many sales as the other guy.
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.
    - 2y ago

nebulous1 2y ago

But they say what they do on their product page. They provide a solution.

dyauspitr 2y ago

On the other hand, I would hate to wade through email chains, type out large emails and wait for delayed async responses drawn out over days. I thrive when I can read the documentation, come prepared to a call and have my questions answered quickly in real time. There’s also something about quickly parsing the realtime information that brings out the best and most relevant questions in me.

ikanreed 2y ago

A lot of companies don't actually sell a product that does anything useful, though. They sell an idea that sounds useful to management, and obscuring the truth earns more money.

snacksmcgee 2y ago
A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-funded forum: scummy garbage makes money. Taking sales people out for steak and whiskey makes money. Lying makes money. (That last point is especially funny considering how startups lie, too, like having a landing page and no product but collecting emails like you do.) The economy is built on grifting, at this point, and every time, people here are shocked, SHOCKED that that is the case.
- spenczar5 2y ago
  > The economy is built on grifting, at this point I agreed until here. Obviously, lying isn't the only way to make money. I make furniture and fix windows in old houses for a living. Am I grifting? When you stretch into hyperbole, you lose the ability to convince people in the middle.
  - calebio 2y ago
    It's not that hyperbolic. I'd say the economy isn't built on you making furniture and fixing windows in old houses for a living. Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on folks like you? No.
    - tomxor 2y ago
      > Do folks like you exist? Yes. Is the economy built on folks like you? No. Are you sure? If you ignore human constructs such as companies and organisations and quantify based on classifications that make more sense for aggregates of workers, you might be surprised how little of the economy is built on the F500 let alone venture capital unicorns.
    - 2y ago

herpdyderp 2y ago

Ironically, I also actually can't figure out what this company does from its website.

diggan 2y ago
The title on the website says "licensing & distribution", the paragraph under that repeats it and the code example shows some software trying to authorize a serial key to see if it's valid or not. I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.
- michaelt 2y ago
  It seems reasonably clear to me, yes - although "distribution" could mean a lot of things. As the documentation is all public, though, it's easy enough to see what they're offering.
Arch-TK 2y ago
Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).
- cyral 2y ago
  Right, I thought it was extremely clear. The code sample on the homepage really makes it click right away for developers and confirm that it's what they need. While developers might not be the decision person, I bet they get a ton of leads from developers who find this company and then ask their management for it.
rib3ye 2y ago
Recently I have been dropping the URL in ChatGPT and asking what the company actually builds, problems they solve, and how they make money. Especially for consulting firms, they really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating what they actually do.

castillar76 2y ago

Even just the pricing component would be lovely — I'm so tired of the "call us to discuss license cost" for anything larger than "absurdly tiny". You don't need to make it penny-accurate, even: I just need a sense of scale. If your product costs something wildly outside my budget, wouldn't you rather save your time to talk with people that can actually afford what you're selling? (I can hear the salespeople warming up in the silos already and no: if I don't have $36 million right now, absolutely nothing you say will make it possible to "find those dollars somewhere".)

dowager_dan99 2y ago
I've seen (and experienced as the seller) 2 main reasons: 1. we can try and squeeze as much juice as possible from every enterprise client 2. we don't actually know our own economics and/or your scenario is so unique we need to invest effort to quote it within a magnitude A distant #3: we offer a truly enterprise solution that is too complex to present as a la carte. This happens, but typically you're angling into consulting our bespoke development. Even the most complex cloud scenarios can be costed to the penny; you might not ever pay this but it's a starting point. Maybe this sort of "soft judgement" is a good use of AI? some degree if contextual reasoning, non-committal answers, more complex than just a formula...
- castillar76 2y ago
  I could see that — having worked for a large network vendor in the past, there are some things that just don't lend themselves to any kind of pricing without some kind of scoping discussion. :) Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more companies think they have that problem than actually have that problem.

cyanydeez 2y ago

Its difficult because lying about "implementation details" is a marketing detail.

arisudesu 2y ago

May it happen that CloudFlare stops sending their call invitations to me. I have an account at them which has shared access to company domains, because sometimes I was needed to assist with them. CloudFlare reps repeatedly e-mail me to schedule a call, even after I replied to them and told that I am not a person directly responsible for our domains and asked to stop mailing me. Whoever was their rep at that time, answered that they will stop. Some time passed, and they started e-mailing again. Eventually I started putting their e-mails to spam folder.

retrochameleon 2y ago

I was in an email back and forth with someone that cold emailed us about a service. Sometimes, I say "what the hell" and take their pitch and see if it's actually worthwhile. But this guy, after I asked him some basic details about his service and what differentiates them, refused to answer my questions and insisted on getting on a call. Nope, I'm not interested. If you can't give me basic info without wasting my time to get on a call about something I'm not sure I give a shit about yet, then I won't do it. You lose my business and my company's business by proxy. Marked as spam and moved on.

RobinL 2y ago

Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because: - it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in) - it usually obscures what the product actually does Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more

tashian 2y ago
How should a company figure out what to charge for something in the first place? Especially a startup that doesn't have much market data to go on, and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of. When this is the case, one option is to do price discovery. And the way to do that is to remove prices from the website, take calls, learn about customers and their needs, and experiment.
- earnestinger 2y ago
  If client pays for a link that’s part of a chain, and doesn’t want the chain broken, and still has profit, it means client can pay more, that link is worth more.
- necovek 2y ago
  When you don't how valuable it's going to be, you at least know how expensive is it to make. For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top. If you can't figure that out either, well...
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of. How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with. -- [0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.

hathawsh 2y ago

People who behave this way are spammers and I mark their emails as spam. It's a small gesture, but it feels good to help identify the spammers.

mrandish 2y ago

> ... post that stuff online. > I do not understand why that's difficult It's not. Having worked on the other side, both in startups I founded and later as a senior exec inside the large F100 valley tech company we were acquired by, this inability to communicate what 'customers who want to buy' 'want to know' constantly mystified me. After deep diving into why it wasn't working at BigCo, I think the root cause is systemic and it's the bottom ~80% of sales and marketing people. In my experience, the top ~20% of sales and marketing people are generally excellent. But the rest seem to be 'performing' their job functions generically without deeply thinking through how to most effectively communicate and sell "this product" to "this customer" in "this context". That's why so many product information pages follow templates which supposedly implement 'best practices' but in reality are pretty terrible. And it's probably why so many product pages lead with vague puffery. I had an anti-puffery rule for marketing copy: only lead with statements of fact about what makes this product different from the top three alternatives which can be proven true or false. "Best in Class"? Nope, anyone can claim that. Say something concrete that matters that we could get sued for lying about. Typical entry level salespeople don't really care that most introductory sales calls are a waste of everyone's time. They are paid to do it anyway - and it's one of the few pre-sales metrics that can be easily tracked, so lazy sales managers make increasing introductory sales calls an objective. That's why anyone suggesting #nocalls, or even just offering it as an alternate sales funnel, faces so much resistance in an existing sales structure. Even proposing an objective A/B test of #nocalls met was met with departmental 'circle the wagons'. After talking it over one-on-one with different stakeholders, there was no clear reason they could articulate to oppose trying it. I suspect it was part "this is the way we (and everyone like us) always does it" and part fear that if it worked it would upset current metrics, budgets and even head count. Professional mid-level managers in large companies aren't interested in upsetting their departmental apple cart (or turbo-charging it), they just want to add a few more apples to it each year.

blitzar 2y ago

Burt. This bloke won't haggle! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwWz0VM94m8