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If you have a clear plan to productise the professional services and not provide them using people on your payroll, and make this transparent to investors, it i

by drsim 12y ago

If you have a clear plan to productise the professional services and not provide them using people on your payroll, and make this transparent to investors, it is in no way lying. In fact, I'd call it a smart way to kickstart a two-sided marketplace.

nraynaud 12y ago
This not how I have seen it happen. First, politically I think that when creating your product you might want to keep the cards close to your chest, so in-house consultants who lunch alternatively with the product engineers and the customers is a way to do that. My second political idea (gotten from "crossing the chasm") is that you don't kickstart platforms, you start a killer application and if you get success, you open it to third parties, you can't start as a platform, you mutate into it. What I have seen happen tho, is sales people pressured or rewarded for either the generated revenue or the gross margin they generate. The easiest way to generate a sale is by selling man hour, because the delivery date is set, it can be quick at the quarter's or fiscal year's end, and there is no real fiddly evaluation of the delivered features (the consultant was there or not). The other trope is that sales people are attracted by big companies (for the brand recognition and the gross margin), where investments are complex and slow to move on, but man hours are bought on the running budget, not on investment, and the sale can move way quicker. And so, by selling man hours at famous big co, you can put a logo and some revenue on your investor's slides. You still haven't found a product/market fit but you have earned some time before it is discovered.
- drsim 12y ago
  If you're building a marketplace why would you not seed it with what you have easiest access to? If you can perform a service in-house that will in future be provided by a marketplace seller and the demand is already there: do it. Users of my free app were asking for services that I could perform. I didn't want to perform the services myself forever but I had zero platform, processes and people in place to achieve that on day one. So I performed the services myself. This gave me a solid understanding of the customer problem and what I'd need to code up to enable service providers to perform the service directly with customers. Now I perform zero services with all of my service providers connecting directly with customers. We take a percentage cut as a true marketplace. The chicken and egg problem of two-sided marketplaces is hard. If you're building a meals-on-wheels service and you need to cook the meals yourself to get the supply side going: do it.

by drsim 12y ago

nraynaud 12y ago

This not how I have seen it happen. First, politically I think that when creating your product you might want to keep the cards close to your chest, so in-house consultants who lunch alternatively with the product engineers and the customers is a way to do that. My second political idea (gotten from "crossing the chasm") is that you don't kickstart platforms, you start a killer application and if you get success, you open it to third parties, you can't start as a platform, you mutate into it. What I have seen happen tho, is sales people pressured or rewarded for either the generated revenue or the gross margin they generate. The easiest way to generate a sale is by selling man hour, because the delivery date is set, it can be quick at the quarter's or fiscal year's end, and there is no real fiddly evaluation of the delivered features (the consultant was there or not). The other trope is that sales people are attracted by big companies (for the brand recognition and the gross margin), where investments are complex and slow to move on, but man hours are bought on the running budget, not on investment, and the sale can move way quicker. And so, by selling man hours at famous big co, you can put a logo and some revenue on your investor's slides. You still haven't found a product/market fit but you have earned some time before it is discovered.

drsim 12y ago
If you're building a marketplace why would you not seed it with what you have easiest access to? If you can perform a service in-house that will in future be provided by a marketplace seller and the demand is already there: do it. Users of my free app were asking for services that I could perform. I didn't want to perform the services myself forever but I had zero platform, processes and people in place to achieve that on day one. So I performed the services myself. This gave me a solid understanding of the customer problem and what I'd need to code up to enable service providers to perform the service directly with customers. Now I perform zero services with all of my service providers connecting directly with customers. We take a percentage cut as a true marketplace. The chicken and egg problem of two-sided marketplaces is hard. If you're building a meals-on-wheels service and you need to cook the meals yourself to get the supply side going: do it.