4 ms·

Am I the only one starting to get tired of these 'sell the shovels' sales pitches directed at SAAS startups? I respect Patrick and what he's done, but to me he

Am I the only one starting to get tired of these 'sell the shovels' sales pitches directed at SAAS startups? I respect Patrick and what he's done, but to me he is coming off more and more sleazy and this particular post doesn't help the case. Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? Is it getting worse or am I just getting more sensitive to it? That's an honest question, shlock like this just makes my skin crawl these days, but maybe I'm in the minority.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rschmitty 13y ago
I think its getting so bad that in addition to the 'sell the shovels' there are lots of 'how to sell the shovels' or 'how we can help you sell the shovels' posts going around. Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels. Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  You could probably describe most economic activity that way, we have relatively simple core wants and needs (we want sex not SaaS). We spend our lives trying to acquire things that help us satisfy those by increasingly indirect means.
- emhart 13y ago
  Selling shovels to the shovel sellers.
- mesozoic 13y ago
  Well sometimes the shovels are made of gold.
ojbyrne 13y ago
It lost me at "362" which patio11 has described below as "(very) figurative"
larrys 13y ago
Reminds me a bit of back in the day when you used to walk the bookstore and pick up the nth book on "how to be good at marketing" or "how to manage people" which you would take home and hopefully read. At a certain point you realized that you had to spend time actually doing and not taking the easy route of reading on how to do something. Getting tips and suggestions only goes so far. This also applied to programming books in the 90's. Buy another O'reilly book when you hadn't even gotten to the 3rd chapter in the previous O'Reilly book. And spend time browsing for the next book about something when you hadn't even begun to understand or master the previous thing. Going even further back this wasn't that much of a problem though. There were very few bookstores that carried computer books (I had to drive to the Princeton U bookstore) and when you got there there might have been 1 or 2 books on a subject so you couldn't get distracted with unlimited content and information.
SyneRyder 13y ago
Not just you, I had a similar reaction when it hit my inbox. The line that stood out for me was "Nuremberg, Germany... [is] a bit far away from the tech-industry in-crowd". Nuremberg's a 1 hour flight from Berlin & 1 hour by train to Munich, both of which have vibrant tech/startup scenes. That line didn't ring true to me, so that's where I archived the email & moved on.
mechanical_fish 13y ago
Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? If your definition of "success" doesn't include selling software, then sure, you can be a success without selling software. But BoS is a conference about the business of software – hence the name – and sales is a primary concern for BoS attendees, because that's the whole point of the software business. The competitive advantage of software is that you only have to build it once. (And, if it's well-written, it costs as little to maintain as possible.) Then you sell it as many times as you can. That's what our professional pursuit of "scalability" is really about: The more "scalable" the product, the less time a company needs to spend worrying about how much work the software can do and the more time the company spends trying to convince people to give the software more things to do. The ideal software company would spend 100% of its time thinking about sales and customer satisfaction and 0% of its time thinking about software. If you or your peers are noticing sales happening more often, it may be because you're becoming more aware of how the software business actually works. You'll need to figure out how to cope with this knowledge. You can choose to embrace it. Or you can choose to avoid working in the software business, which is easy to do. (Most programming jobs are not part of the software business, and even those that are often have nothing to do with the strategic side of the business. Though, I have to warn you, once you've learned to see the strategic side of the software business it is hard to un-see. And the power to change the real world at scale is addictive and is not lightly discarded.)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
There is a earning ceiling for software developers who do not sell, or are not lucky in the equity lottery. That ceiling is around 100 USD an hour. It may vary geographically but its really a ceiling. And guess what, on my little business park where I have an office, the owners of many of the businesses do not experience that ceiling. They sell. I like their nice cars. I want one too. So I am learning to sell. I also have "The Little Schemer" open next to me, and dream of the time when children learn the 4 r's - reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and recursion. Just because I want to sell, does not mean I am abandoning my principles or my profession. I hope to contribute further. But I want to be more secure, and earning more will help that a lot.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rschmitty 13y ago

I think its getting so bad that in addition to the 'sell the shovels' there are lots of 'how to sell the shovels' or 'how we can help you sell the shovels' posts going around. Don't dig for gold, sell shovels! Want to learn how to sell shovels? Subscribe to our newsletter where we teach you 3-4 things and then end up with us trying to sell you on stuff that will help you selling shovels. Next thing you know, you are paying for 50 different services so you can "focus on selling shovels"

jiggy2011 13y ago
You could probably describe most economic activity that way, we have relatively simple core wants and needs (we want sex not SaaS). We spend our lives trying to acquire things that help us satisfy those by increasingly indirect means.
emhart 13y ago
Selling shovels to the shovel sellers.
mesozoic 13y ago
Well sometimes the shovels are made of gold.

ojbyrne 13y ago

It lost me at "362" which patio11 has described below as "(very) figurative"

larrys 13y ago

Reminds me a bit of back in the day when you used to walk the bookstore and pick up the nth book on "how to be good at marketing" or "how to manage people" which you would take home and hopefully read. At a certain point you realized that you had to spend time actually doing and not taking the easy route of reading on how to do something. Getting tips and suggestions only goes so far. This also applied to programming books in the 90's. Buy another O'reilly book when you hadn't even gotten to the 3rd chapter in the previous O'Reilly book. And spend time browsing for the next book about something when you hadn't even begun to understand or master the previous thing. Going even further back this wasn't that much of a problem though. There were very few bookstores that carried computer books (I had to drive to the Princeton U bookstore) and when you got there there might have been 1 or 2 books on a subject so you couldn't get distracted with unlimited content and information.

SyneRyder 13y ago

Not just you, I had a similar reaction when it hit my inbox. The line that stood out for me was "Nuremberg, Germany... [is] a bit far away from the tech-industry in-crowd". Nuremberg's a 1 hour flight from Berlin & 1 hour by train to Munich, both of which have vibrant tech/startup scenes. That line didn't ring true to me, so that's where I archived the email & moved on.

mechanical_fish 13y ago

Can we be successful without doing the hard sales thing? If your definition of "success" doesn't include selling software, then sure, you can be a success without selling software. But BoS is a conference about the business of software – hence the name – and sales is a primary concern for BoS attendees, because that's the whole point of the software business. The competitive advantage of software is that you only have to build it once. (And, if it's well-written, it costs as little to maintain as possible.) Then you sell it as many times as you can. That's what our professional pursuit of "scalability" is really about: The more "scalable" the product, the less time a company needs to spend worrying about how much work the software can do and the more time the company spends trying to convince people to give the software more things to do. The ideal software company would spend 100% of its time thinking about sales and customer satisfaction and 0% of its time thinking about software. If you or your peers are noticing sales happening more often, it may be because you're becoming more aware of how the software business actually works. You'll need to figure out how to cope with this knowledge. You can choose to embrace it. Or you can choose to avoid working in the software business, which is easy to do. (Most programming jobs are not part of the software business, and even those that are often have nothing to do with the strategic side of the business. Though, I have to warn you, once you've learned to see the strategic side of the software business it is hard to un-see. And the power to change the real world at scale is addictive and is not lightly discarded.)

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

There is a earning ceiling for software developers who do not sell, or are not lucky in the equity lottery. That ceiling is around 100 USD an hour. It may vary geographically but its really a ceiling. And guess what, on my little business park where I have an office, the owners of many of the businesses do not experience that ceiling. They sell. I like their nice cars. I want one too. So I am learning to sell. I also have "The Little Schemer" open next to me, and dream of the time when children learn the 4 r's - reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and recursion. Just because I want to sell, does not mean I am abandoning my principles or my profession. I hope to contribute further. But I want to be more secure, and earning more will help that a lot.