alt.hn

1/11/2025 at 11:20:10 PM

Stop Trying to Schedule a Call with Me

 https://matduggan.com/stop-trying-to-schedule-a-call-with-me/

by birdculture

1/12/2025 at 1:21:07 AM

Against all of the advice in the world, I'm trying to set things up to avoid basically everything described in the article. It's tricky because the truth is that a lot of the tactics work and that is why companies implement them. A lot of investors also consider that process to be best-in-class and look for it as a sign of maturity.

The counter approach is: - Make complete information available as transparently as possible and don't gate it. - Be forthcoming about weaknesses. Don't force prospects and customers to find them. - Ensure that when a prospect or customer does want to talk to someone, they immediately reach someone who can handle the problem or answer the question (no need for escalations.) - Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that and be sure that all AI agents immediately disclose that they are AI. - Offer flexible e-mail list subscription options (monthly, quarterly, annually, only release notes, etc.) - If the product is not a fit, try to offer something useful anyway such as a suggestion of another product that might be a better match for their needs.

Value based pricing is one of the reasons why a lot of companies end up in these situations. Rather than setting a standard price, the company does a detailed investigation of the customer to try to find out how much value they will gain from using the product and then they set the price based on that determination. Although it maximizes revenue in theory, it is slow and invasive.

by SteveVeilStream

1/12/2025 at 1:41:09 AM

More power to you but in my experience

- people don’t read your documentation - if they find one edge-case that is not covered by your product they concentrate all their energy on it even though the competitor product doesn’t even work for the happy path (but ofc they won’t learn that until too late) - you will have a person on the free tier who is not able to the simplest programming take up all the time of your technical support if you let them

The rest (disclose usage of AI, offer multiple newsletters (imo unnecessary work), be upfront if it’s not a good fit) is very sensible and works in my experience.

The first three will break your product - but maybe I’m just cynical and was holding it wrong all this time

edit: I’m assuming you want to build some kind of investor fuelled unicorn - your approach probably will work for a single person slow but steady growth while you have other side income

by portaouflop

1/12/2025 at 2:29:30 AM

You need docs. Most users won’t read them. Do a good job anyway because they can save you a TON of support costs if they’re good, even for the few people who do read them. The cost of writing docs is easily offset by even a modest reduction in human support cost, unless you just half-ass your support with LLMs and FAQs and chat with overseas wage slaves.

ALSO: your UX needs to warn people about sharp edges and one-way doors, BEFORE your user commits to an action they might regret. These are not incompatible.

by efitz

1/12/2025 at 2:51:54 AM

If nothing else, the "smart cows" will read the docs and may even help out on support forums when some of the user base doesn't and decides to complain. Docs are good for everyone and will save time internally and externally.

>your UX needs to warn people about sharp edges and one-way doors, BEFORE your user commits to an action they might regret. These are not incompatible.

Assuming trump doesn't nix it, the recent FTC ruling should fix this by itself. it should be as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe.

by johnnyanmac

1/12/2025 at 7:18:13 AM

I don’t think easy unsubscribe falls under «sharp edges and one-way doors». But high friction unsubscribe probably goes hand in hand with sharp edges and one-way doors at those lead you to want to unsubscribe…therefore they make it hard.

by eigilsagafos

1/12/2025 at 3:25:10 AM

Docs are a great defense against clients that demand hand-holding, even if nobody ever actually reads them. If they ask a question covered by the docs, simply point them at the docs and they'll go away indefinitely rather than read something.

by taneq

1/12/2025 at 12:41:03 PM

My point is that the clients that matter will require hand-holding.

Sure if you just sell to hobby programmers and students it’s no problem. But if your customers should be real businesses - in my experience 90% of them require a lot of handholding, you literally have to read the docs for them and tell them in a call.

by portaouflop

1/13/2025 at 4:50:06 PM

Clients that won't use the docs and need handholding can pay for service: sell them training, and you can use the docs already written as the training material.

by BehindBlueEyes

1/12/2025 at 10:24:09 AM

Even if no one reads docs up front - having some documentation to point them to is a must.

I cannot imagine making stuff up all the time as you go. Maybe if system is super small. But then even better to build up documentation to have it for later.

by ozim

1/12/2025 at 3:11:04 AM

Also, it's pretty easy at this point to setup an AI support agent that can reference your docs, and it is a helpful exercise for organizing your own thoughts and being able to communicate them back to yourself. There's not really a good reason to not have good docs.

I just assume that if a product is gated behind "let's hope on a call!" it's still vaporware and there's a 50/50 chance that they'll pivot within a few months.

by babyshake

1/12/2025 at 2:55:36 AM

They also are great for the support team, to "educate" where they can find additional info and for linking as help links if the interface needs this.

by freefaler

1/12/2025 at 12:40:19 PM

Also docs can be effective for marketing especially if you sell bottom-up to devs. If i visit a site and see a section for docs, it means they are catering to my needs

by AznHisoka

1/12/2025 at 12:50:48 PM

You definitely needs docs, they are just as important as the product.

But thinking all your prospects will read the docs is a fallacy- maybe 5% of prospects fall into the category of OP, more commonly they won’t even know what their own requirements are, let alone how to map that to your product/docs

by portaouflop

1/12/2025 at 6:32:47 AM

> if they find one edge-case that is not covered by your product they concentrate all their energy on it

Having run into this many many times it's usually because that little edge case is where the hard problem lives in the problem domain and is the reason, whether the customers know it consciously or not, they bought it. Who pays for something that only handles the easy cases? The author even talks about it with the "one specific thing" line. I guarantee it's that one stubborn edge case.

It's likely you reached for a solution in the first place because you wanted something to turn a problem with a mix of difficulties into an easy one offloaded to a 3rd party.

by Spivak

1/12/2025 at 5:22:15 AM

Docs aren't just for the users, they're for your support team as well. A lot of times I'll put in a support request for some product we use and the first thing support sends back is documentation. Most of the time, that's all I need and it saves us both a ton of time.

by bongodongobob

1/12/2025 at 8:02:01 AM

> Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that [...]

Are there real humans / customers who ask, "yes, have an AI call me?"

by kashyapc

1/12/2025 at 5:55:30 PM

There are times when I would ask for this. If it's midnight on a Saturday and the website says: "You can reach a human agent 9-5 M-F or we can have an AI agent call you right now" then I might opt for the AI agent. I may also do this if I want to take a call while out for a bike ride, in a noisy place, etc. Talking to AI means I don't need to worry about being polite which is actually very convenient.

by SteveVeilStream

1/12/2025 at 11:58:51 AM

> Are there real humans / customers who ask, "yes, have an AI call me?"

If it could go faster than a slow-talking human who needs to re-verify information that someone else already verified? Yes, I'd opt for the AI.

by drewcoo

1/12/2025 at 3:27:35 PM

True, it depends on the quality of the human on the other side. If it's a mindless front-line support person parroting a script, "did you try restarting the computer?", then I'd take a smarter AI too.

by kashyapc

1/12/2025 at 1:41:30 AM

Good advice.

I created and sold software (and services) for over a decade, and could never have lived with myself if I'd treated customers the way the original article describes.

by rkagerer

1/12/2025 at 2:55:49 AM

sadly, they do it because it works, and (not trying to be too offensive): lotta people are dumb. If you're confused, a nice "team mate" will be more comforting than a cold hard doc and web form. Even if they are upcharging you on a bunch of stuff you will never use. They call multiple times because some people genuinely forget and appreciate the reminder.

I'm sure you knew all this better than me, but just want to elaborate for anyone who genuinely don't understands who falls for this.

by johnnyanmac

1/12/2025 at 12:21:43 PM

The counter approach is better for everyone, less work for the company and a nicer experience for the user, but only in a vacuum.

Unregulated competition is a race to the bottom, so the most unethical, invasive, borderline illegal, and manipulative tactics come out on top. Not the best product, but the best marketing. Not the most customer friendly, but the most customer-converting through coercion. Not pricing products and services what they're worth, but the most anyone will be wiling to pay for them.

by moffkalast

1/12/2025 at 5:35:26 AM

Your list isn't rendered as a list

by Tepix

1/12/2025 at 12:01:01 PM

> The counter approach is: - Make complete information available as transparently as possible and don't gate it. - Be forthcoming about weaknesses. Don't force prospects and customers to find them. - Ensure that when a prospect or customer does want to talk to someone, they immediately reach someone who can handle the problem or answer the question (no need for escalations.) - Never have an AI agent call someone unless the customer specifically requests that and be sure that all AI agents immediately disclose that they are AI. - Offer flexible e-mail list subscription options (monthly, quarterly, annually, only release notes, etc.) - If the product is not a fit, try to offer something useful anyway such as a suggestion of another product that might be a better match for their needs.

From the perspective of designing a sales org to do this it is, roughly, a sales-engineer focused sales organization with the sales engineers on a minimal commission plan (i.e., a pooled 80% base/20% commission plan instead of something like an individual 70/30 plan.)

I never saw it in practice, but it would probably have something like a 2:1 ratio of sales engineers to account managers. On the plus side, sales engineers are less costly to employ than account managers. On the down side, this will almost certainly result in lower revenue.

> Value based pricing is one of the reasons why a lot of companies end up in these situations. Rather than setting a standard price, the company does a detailed investigation of the customer to try to find out how much value they will gain from using the product and then they set the price based on that determination. Although it maximizes revenue in theory, it is slow and invasive.

In my experience (working in tech sales for a few large manufacturers,) this is almost never a routine practice of the sales team. It is sometimes discussed in sales training, and very, very occasionally put into practice, but the Achilles heel is your last comment: it is slow and invasive. Sales people are a diverse group, but they are united by the belief that time kills all deals.

Product teams do large scale market segmentation and price sensitivity studies -- that's where you get all of the packaging options. Sales teams? If they have a large existing customer, that customer will already have a standard discount level. That's the starting point for any given negotiation. For new customers or smaller customers, the sales team will try to sell at the 'standard' price, where by 'standard', I mean the prevailing discount level in their region. Variables that will ultimately cause the price paid to change: fiscal year-end/quarter-end, competition, bundling, "incentives" / customer "budget." I put those roughly in terms of how powerful a lever they are to move the price, on average.

Fiscal year-end/quarter-end. One challenge with trying to root out traditional sales/purchasing behavior is that customers are trained to reinforce the behavior. While it doesn't always work (a sales rep might be significantly under or over goal and might want a deal to slip into the next quarter/year,) if a customer can force a deal to get done around the end of the vendor's fiscal periods, they have significant leverage to negotiate a lower price if the vendor believes the deal might slip.

Competition - this one is pretty obvious, but adding a competitor to your purchase evaluation and letting the vendor you want to buy from know that you are seriously considering their competitor will likely result in a lower price. Bonus points for the purchasing team telling the vendor their engineers like the competitor's product better, but the purchasing team really wants to buy from you because they love you so much. Double bonus points for telling both vendors that.

Bundling -- if a manufacturer has multiple products, they often will voluntarily increase their discount level to induce the customer to buy a product 'suite'. The sales reps are often under immense pressure to sell the newer and flakier products on their price lists, and this is usually the only way it gets done. On the plus side, the customer gets more product for the same price. On the down side, the extra products included often aren't worth using, and come renewal time, the true total cost of ownership becomes apparent.

"Incentives" / "customer budget" - these are both, typically, BS in that the vendor doesn't usually have a magic "incentive" to offer a one-time discount. The sales rep just got (or thinks they can get) approval for a lower price. Similarly, while customers most certainly do have budgets, they often lie and say they can't buy x because it exceeds their budget, when their internal sales people (the purchasing team) just wants a lower price. I refer to the purchasing team as "internal sales people" because they often-times have a commission incentive just like the vendor sales rep: it isn't uncommon for them to have a personal, individual bonus tied to driving vendor contracts down in price. In some cases, it is a direct commission -- i.e., the purchasing agent (or sometimes budget owner) gets 10% of any monies saved.

I wish you the best of luck, but other than taking people completely out of the equation, I think it is really hard to eliminate this behavior in practice because 1) it is so thoroughly ingrained amongst both vendors and customers and 2) it works.

by marcus0x62

1/12/2025 at 1:58:23 PM

Someone needs to write the other side of the story as a small startup owner having to deal with big businesses. It should feature:

- Beeing asked for demos when they could have tried your free tier/trial and you have decent doc (They always prefer that you waste your time then asking someone on thier side to review)

- Being used a price/feature comparison with your enterprise competitor just so they can get a better deal on their renewal (no stupid they never intended to change)

- Having to fill endless security questionnaire without being sure you can even sell to them (what you dont love filling 100+ questions at 11PM on a Friday???).

- Having to deal 3-6 months with procurement, often with one or two third party software resellers which only cares if he can make its margin (hello there CDW, no I wont lower my price 15% so you can make money)

- Receiving the money 60-90 days after the deal close while you struggle with cashflow and you had to provide the service (and receiving a call from my bank rep to see why my margin and CC is full).

I am sure I can think of more things. That is why I will absolutely charge an arm and leg to big businesses.

by Sytten

1/12/2025 at 2:46:04 PM

This is why we have a flat "we won't fill in your forms" rule and only take card payments. We've lost some clients because of it sure, but we're a small team so it's fine.

I think being up front about what you will and won't do really helps. They still ask for procurement forms and stuff but we can at least deny it and set an expectation.

https://help.timetastic.co.uk/hc/en-us/articles/115003288769...

by turkeywelder

1/12/2025 at 3:23:50 PM

And that's for selling a fixed off-the-shelf solution.

If you have something that needs to be a bit bespoke, or is an early-startup collaboration with a pilot customer as you refine and prove PMF... (and the customer is a real company, not just some other startups in your investors' portfolios)... and it impacts more than one very small team there... even if you already have the ear of their CEO... brace yourself for months of countless meetings with "stakeholders" of numerous departments.

Which, as a nimble early startup, impresses upon you why, in theory, you should have a massive innovation advantage over large, lumbering businesses, who can't seem to do anything.

Except you made the mistake of needing the buy-in of a large, lumbering business who can't seem to do anything. Now most of their barriers to movement are also yours. :)

by neilv

1/12/2025 at 9:47:08 PM

At the startup I work with, one of our larger corporate customers needed several months of email customizations/branding for a monthly alert email our platform sends before they would finalize their deal with us.

by docmars

1/12/2025 at 1:13:05 PM

Accurate and nicely written article.

There's a worse angle I've seen on the same story: A different engineer, who was already running the good open source solution successfully with their team, heard the other engineer had an enterprise sales assault dumped on them, for some load of trash, and so tried to sound the alarm, but it was already out of the other engineer's hands, because upper subtrees of the org chart had already signed on with political capital (and in a couple cases, it's somehow become an express personal performance metric that they spend the company's money on this specific product). So all alternatives are blocked, everyone has to wait the next couple months for the sale to finalize, and then another month for IT to set up the SSO and databases, and forced to migrate from working solutions to garbage. Then eventually the contract doesn't get renewed, with appropriate face-saving for those who pushed it through, but half the people upon whom it was inflicted have already found jobs in better companies, a quarter got PIP'd or stalled careers for being sabotaged by the trash, and the remaining quarter will mostly be laid off next year.

Just say NO to enterprise sales.

The only thing worse than having to do enterprise sales to sell your own product, is being the employees forced to use the likely bad purchasing decisions of other enterprise sales.

by neilv

1/12/2025 at 1:06:30 AM

This story is for me a real painful death I have experienced way too many times, absolutely nuts.

But then you find an open source solution which is in general better and can do everything you want (simply tested already with just a docker compose up) but for deployment you get hit hard by compliance who just checks the SOC2 certifications and wants a in-depth due diligence of the code since everyone in the world can theoretically change it. Then your manager asks how it can be so good if it's for free and open source. And of course, last but not least, your overloaded team in general not happy to support just another unpredictable piece of software...

So it's the question to rather burn money and nerves with an awful SaaS offering and their endless and useless sales cycles and terrible and super expensive vendor-lock-ins or burn some money and nerves by utilising and running open source inhouse...

So typically I prefer to chose for the open source option and especially if the SaaS option isn't allowing me easy and fast self-onboarding, meaningful testing periods and a predictable and transparent pricing.

And then, if it get's widely adopted, I allocate some budget to support the authors and/or get some support plan (for more complex open source software) in place even though you most likely never need it...

by Scotrix

1/12/2025 at 8:19:09 AM

I know the author says this for humor and effect:

"[...] I'll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it's maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo."

The poor, single recluse discovers one Tuesday afternoon that your company makes 100 million dollars a year with "CodeSquish", while not contributing anything back. He silently questions his life choices—or, shall we say, licensing choices—while feeding chickens on his Vermont farm.

by kashyapc

1/12/2025 at 10:39:26 AM

Realistically it doesn’t work like that often.

Most of OSS or even SaaS stuff is useful in F500 company but not more like convenience and not being able to put value on it. This also you can see in article even SaaS vendors have to make shit up to seem more valuable for big companies and use value based pricing by calling people and trying to push BS on them.

I also don’t see companies running much OSS systems as reselling them because then usually they rather build their crappy one like article mentions because they want to own whole IP.

Amazon pulling it of on Elastic was mostly because Elastic built a brand - they are not pulling this off on a random project. They might use some project to run their infra but attribution of value to a specific lib or project is super hard. Then also Amazon is making money because it is Amazon not because they use Linux kernel. It is hard to wrap head around anyway ;)

by ozim

1/12/2025 at 8:48:29 AM

Thinking about it, maybe he should start sending invoices to the larger companies. If they're reasonably small and for a product the company does use, finance will just pay them without questioning a thing.

by Asooka

1/12/2025 at 9:49:48 AM

"CodeSquish" in this article is a fictional example!

Edit: from a quick search, there is a SaaS company called "CodeSquish". I haven't checked if it's also an open source project.

by kashyapc

1/12/2025 at 8:04:16 PM

>there is a SaaS company called "CodeSquish"

Sometimes nobody could just make this stufff up . . .

by fuzzfactor

1/12/2025 at 4:25:17 AM

This is very true and funny. I’d make a few points though:

1) It may turn out that a lot of this is necessary in order to sell B2B and keep half of the software industry going. The business on the sell side might need to reach out multiple times, engage a sales engineer, help you align all the decision makers etc otherwise it simply wouldn’t get done. Buyers are so busy and selling to a big company is so complex that some of this is just a necessary evil for B2B commerce to continue.

2) Imagine if companies were actually better at buying. They spend $millions on enterprise bloatware when startups can literally produce something 10x better at a 10th of the cost. If they were easier to sell to then we could all have nice things without this madness.

I agree that the OPs experience is soul destroying, but clients could help themselves a little and end up with more money in their pockets and better tech.

by benjaminwootton

1/12/2025 at 6:39:35 AM

> something 10x better at a 10th of the cost

SLAs and contractual assurances are very hard to deliver at 1% cost.

Enterprise products is just another class, and it has nothing to do with the product.

by tossandthrow

1/12/2025 at 7:31:49 AM

Having had the misfortune of navigating a particularly ineffective large corporate purchasing machine, this resonates.

Nobody in the chain is interested in outcomes, they’re interested in completed process.

The value of something to the business is totally uninteresting to a purchasing person. They care about contractual arrangements, compliance with all sorts of poorly thought out ethics agreements, and making sure that all the process has been followed.

The result is far more money spent for far less outcome than if we’d just got a credit card and bought something. There’s a whole ecosystem of companies which are terrible at actually solving problems, but know exactly how to meet all the requirements of a large corporate purchasing department.

It’s depressing.

by leoedin

1/12/2025 at 11:51:19 PM

I once had a small discussion with senior leadership that it was easier for me to spend $100k worth of engineering time on a project than to purchase a $1000 license.

by Plasmoid

1/12/2025 at 11:15:25 AM

[dead]

by throawayonthe

1/12/2025 at 12:29:00 AM

I've had a couple of experiences in the past month where I do respond to the enthusiastic sales engineer's check-in with a genuine product question, only to receive an immediate, lengthy, and subtly wrong LLM generated response. It feels gross.

by DriftRegion

1/12/2025 at 12:50:47 AM

Two comically bad lines in an AI-generated spam email I recently received:

"Saw on LinkedIn that you spoke Spanish. I've heard that the way "¡Qué chévere!" brings such energy and brightness to a conversation is uniquely charming. Have you had a chance to practice it recently?"

"Develop a compliance automation tool that adapitates to changing regulations, reducing overhead costs while ensuring secure and efficient investment programs."

No human would ever see my "limited working proficiency" of Spanish on LinkedIn and say something like the first line! And the second? "Adapitates" is not a real word, it's a hallucination. https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1d8gc6x/did_chatgp...

Sales isn't the problem, and most people are tolerant of some level of sales. I've gotten unpersonalized cold outreach from a data replication company that actually made me interested in the product, because it was short, to the point, and (as far as spam emails can be), authentic.

by jlund-molfese

1/13/2025 at 3:29:26 PM

For the recruiters, a really good way to tell if you are being LLM'd is to put a little special watermarking sauce in your LinkedIn profile current company/position. For example, if you are a database engineer at some specific government agency, in the current position, you'd put something like "DB Engineer" at "Government". A quality recruiter will dig more, maybe look at your actual resume you have linked from your static site or whatever and come up with a good greeting in an email. A bot/LLM will simply insert that generic text into the direct message or email - "your position at government".

One can even go as far as entering something with even more of a watermark. An example: Adding more spaces in the role, like "DB Engineer" with two spaces instead of one. Using the Alt + (Numpad 255) unicode instead of a regular space is a bonus here.

Doesn't always work, but anecdotally I've noticed it will more often than not in differentiating automated garbage.

by Shocka1

1/12/2025 at 3:03:29 AM

How is AI hallucinating words now? I thought that would have been the easiest thing to restrict with a sufficient dictionary.

Or maybe it's an ancient dictionary. I was kind of surprised at the sizes of ]dictionaries I could find while trying to test out a personal project.

by johnnyanmac

1/12/2025 at 6:04:35 AM

IIUC the input to LLMs is tokenized not on word boundaries but some kind of inter-syllable boundaries, because then whatever the model associated with "task" will also apply to "tasking", "tasked", "taskmaster", etc for example. So a model making up compounds that don't exist would be fully possible and even desirable, especially since real humans do it with English all the time.

by Arnavion

1/12/2025 at 7:56:16 AM

They’re called “lemma”

by staticautomatic

1/12/2025 at 8:19:11 AM

The intent is the same, but as I understand it LLMs don't tokenize based on lemmas, though some of the tokens probably line up with them.

by Arnavion

1/12/2025 at 4:46:41 AM

Wow, I would normally assume that a made-up word is proof that it wasn't AI generated, just regular bad human writing.

by andrewflnr

1/12/2025 at 1:06:44 AM

Maybe adapitates should be a word! ;-)

by Aloha

1/12/2025 at 8:46:08 PM

After all, LLM is not supposed to regurgitate things verbatim :)

Just regurgitate things . . .

by fuzzfactor

1/12/2025 at 1:19:27 AM

Was the main reason you were interested in it because you actually could see yourself using the product? Rather than because it was short and to the point?

by AznHisoka

1/12/2025 at 12:38:05 AM

Please consider responding and telling them how you feel and providing feedback in whatever feedback forms that accompany the ticket.

Every company on Earth is exploring this tech and if we don't give them strong signals when they fuck it up we are just dooming our future selves to this garbage.

by noman-land

1/12/2025 at 2:48:38 AM

> providing feedback > ticket

Where do you work that this is an effective strategy?

In my experience telling a vendor something is broken wastes my time and has no effect on the vendor. I don't know whether sales don't care or sales can't make dev changes. The only exception is when I can contact the devs and I know the devs have a history of fixing problems.

by robocat

1/12/2025 at 3:22:21 AM

I used to work in customer service in a big tech company, what you are told to do is to reply with a sorry message and to fill a ticket but the ticket is not actually handled, it's just there to be recorded and maybe they will lookup it up by the end of the quarter.

by kelvinjps10

1/12/2025 at 1:41:39 PM

Pay me so I'll provide feedback. Otherwise stop wasting my time with unwanted spam.

You are wasting my time, not yours, because you automated your spam workflow. The only strategical response is to flag your emails as spam ans to block your emails in the future.

Everything else is a losing game strategy because there are more spam emails per day than available time already.

by cookiengineer

1/12/2025 at 11:03:11 PM

You want to be paid for your feedback meanwhile you're here providing that exact feedback but into the void and for free.

by noman-land

1/15/2025 at 10:31:29 PM

I have to admit my failure. I got ragebaited and fell for it.

by cookiengineer

1/12/2025 at 3:32:26 AM

Seconded. Also imagine not just shouting feedback at a person who doesn't care but that function being replaced by an llm that literally can't care.

by collingreen

1/12/2025 at 5:18:03 AM

You misunderstand. Think of it from a data standpoint.

What they have. Ticket. Feedback.

If they see tickets with certain feedback scores, some rep's score will go down and some manager's score will go down and if enough people do this (it literally takes a 1-2 digit amount of people in most cases), someone will raise an eyebrow and ask some questions and read the <99 responses that came in about this topic.

Since so few people actually respond to feedback, anyone who does has a massively outsized impact on the numbers that get reported inside the company, and the messages that get passed around inside the company.

I should clarify that when I say "Feedback" it does not mean yelling at a support rep, it means responding with a low score or a frowny face or whatever metric in their system that indicates quantitative disapproval.

by noman-land

1/12/2025 at 5:50:19 PM

That's a lot of assumptions on how a company you don't know internally handles tickets and/or feedback.

by tremon

1/12/2025 at 5:26:48 AM

I'm not talking about telling them that something is broken, but moreso telling them that you are disappointed. They only care that something is broken insofar as it affects their sales. A soured customer or potential customer, or famous person, or professional, or anyone else, is a long term drag on the reputation of a company. Much more than a silent customer that does nothing.

Just do something instead of nothing. Mark as spam. Post a negative thing. Email them. Post on social media. Just do something instead of nothing. Show your disapproval out loud to everyone instead of silently accepting it and moving on. Please.

by noman-land

1/12/2025 at 6:02:43 AM

1) There are too many broken things in the world.

2) Why should the victim be expected to waste their time.

If I posted a small complaint about every broken interaction, it would be a firehose. Imagine complaining about every website popover or pothole...

by robocat

1/12/2025 at 7:06:50 AM

Imagine complaining about none of them.

Also, being a victim is by definition a waste of time because you didn't ask to be a victim. You can be a victim and quietly take it, letting it perpetuate and condemning both your future self and those you care about, or you can be a victim and fight back, refuse to take it, and defend your future self and those you care about.

This behavior is that of a bully and abuser. Bullies and abusers will only listen to a slap in the face, not to quiet submission.

by noman-land

1/12/2025 at 7:35:57 AM

I think you are saying we should blame the victim.

Bullies want you to fight back because now you're playing their game according to their rules which they know how to win and you implicitly authorise them to hurt you and often you have handed them a moral highground excuse they can spit back at you later. Bullies don't "listen" to a slap in the face, instead they escalate further: good luck!

Fighting is high risk. I do believe in fighting when necessary and here is a fantastic article that perhaps supports your view: https://radicalcontributions.substack.com/p/escalation-theor...

To win against a bully often requires changing the game so that you can win by other rules.

However not everyone has the ability/practice to handle conflict - a friend talking back with a female bully recently had a panic attack which was a horrific side effect for them.

by robocat

1/12/2025 at 12:57:22 AM

Anyone who doesn’t have their head up their ass would realize this.

Better to not tell them and just boycott them.

Those companies who don’t push the boundaries on how bad they can treat their (potential) customers deserve to be rewarded.

by david38

1/12/2025 at 12:23:09 PM

The only universal feedback for business is money – don't give them any and you're giving all the feedback you need to.

Anything else is wasting your time.

by duggan

1/12/2025 at 1:19:48 AM

You have to pay extra to get 12- (or 4-) hour support SLAs and SSO access because if you didn't, the entry level of the product would cost integer multiples more. The people that want those product features --- regardless of how much they cost (support: a fortune; a SOC-2 report: zero) --- subsidize the people who don't. If it helps: just look at the "bells-and-whistles" package with SSO and an SLA as the true price of the product. Nothing in technology is really cost-based pricing to begin with.

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 2:30:22 AM

This. And to expand on the above: few people consider how much it actually costs to provide 12- or 4- hour support with a strict SLA. This pretty much means that the business needs to bear the full loaded cost of at least one additional employee. Now go divide that fully loaded cost (take the salary and multiply it by 2x, roughly, and I'm not quoting any numbers here to avoid stupid discussions about "but it costs less to hire a person in my area") by the number of customers that require these SLAs and see how much this needs to cost.

by jwr

1/12/2025 at 2:33:41 AM

Support is an example of an "enterprise" feature with a high cost basis. SSO is an example of an "enterprise" feature with almost zero cost basis. But in both cases, the cost is a sideshow. The real driver for the pricing of these features is market segmentation: the customers with high expectations of support, or a requirement to have SSO, strongly tend to be less price sensitive than the rest of customers. The fundamental goal of product pricing is to find ways to charge price-insensitive customers more than price-sensitive customers.

Like, yes, you'd lose money offering 4-hour-SLA support to customers paying the entry-level price. But you could make that decision, and have part of your business model be subsidizing those customers. It depends on everything else in your model; how you acquire customers, what their lifetime value is, &c.

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 3:09:37 AM

Making SSO a premium feature isn't any different from the paid SSL of the 2000s. You'll reduce security and safety just to segment the market.

And in my experience, SSO doesn't need to be expensive. SAML and Kerberos should be expensive, sure. But OIDC with standard seevices such as Google, GitHub, Okta or Keycloak should absolutely be part of the base package.

Personally, I'll just build the open core version from source and add all the "enterprise" features like SSO, S3 and Prometheus metrics myself.

by kuschku

1/12/2025 at 3:32:20 AM

"Need" has nothing to do with why SSO is expensive. There is no meaningful difference, from a business model perspective, between SAML and OIDC (though: don't do SAML). SSO is expensive because customers that require it are less price sensitive than customers that don't.

By all means: build your own SSO on the open core of products that charge for SSO. I promise: the companies don't really care that you're doing this. You're profoundly segmenting yourself out by doing that.

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 3:58:30 AM

> There is no meaningful difference, from a business model perspective, between SAML and OIDC (though: don't do SAML).

Oh there absolutely is. The customers that use OIDC use a relatively light stack and are generally okay with relatively simple setups. They're usually startups and are also the ones that can feasibly add SSO into your app themselves.

The customers that need SAML are older, larger companies often with a custom mix of multiple hybrid AD and AzureAD directories for each department that need special handling with custom properties and realtime sync. You'll be spending at least a few engineer-months on support for them.

I've been on both sides previously, I've seen it all.

by kuschku

1/12/2025 at 5:31:36 AM

That's all fascinating, and I've done security assessments of about a dozen SAML implementations (don't do SAML) and have built several OIDC SSO implementations (whatever I'm fine with OIDC), but none of this has anything to do with product pricing.

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 5:41:55 PM

Well you focused pretty hard on the word need, but do you disagree with "Making SSO a premium feature isn't any different from the paid SSL of the 2000s. You'll reduce security and safety just to segment the market."?

by Dylan16807

1/12/2025 at 4:41:19 AM

The problem with 4 hour SLA (I'm assuming in non-business hours?) Is that it's eye-watering expensive to scale.

If I have 100 cheap customers I need to scale it for 100. If I have 3 I can get by with putting staff "on call". (Pay the existing staff a bonus for out of hours etc.)

You can't pay $20 a month for something, and expect a high SLA . That's not reasonable (and certainly not sustainable. ) a business that offered that would be on my "don't touch, will be out of business soon" category.

It's certainly possible to have a "free tier" - there are hood reasons for that. But the free tier had better not be costing you money. If they do, you don't have a business you have a hobby.

by bruce511

1/12/2025 at 11:39:56 PM

> I can get by with putting staff "on call". (Pay the existing staff a bonus for out of hours etc.)

There is a big difference between just winging something (and then hearing people complain on HN about how they have to work crazy hours and be on call) and doing things the right way, in a long-term sustainable business, with good work practices that also respect the employees.

Also, if you're running a solo-founder business, you can't "pay the existing staff a bonus for out of hours etc". You simply can't be on call for 24h/day, which means you need to hire an additional person -> see my comment above about the costs.

by jwr

1/12/2025 at 11:36:02 PM

> SSO is an example of an "enterprise" feature with almost zero cost basis

Certainly not. Having looked at SSO recently in my SaaS, both implementation and maintenance costs were very significant.

The usual answer is "just outsource it to [whatever external service]", which apart from implementation and maintenance costs also introduces complex external technical and business dependencies.

Sorry — I know this is not the main topic of this discussion.

by jwr

1/12/2025 at 6:00:43 AM

I don't think the 4-hour SLA customers subsidize the 72-hour ones. It's more about managing the volume of support. If know you won't get an until 3 days after, you will google obvious things yourself, and only contact support if you can't get the answer otherwise. But shorter SLAs, let alone phone support, encourages a particular kind of customers to just copy-paste any error message they encounter (that may not necessarily come from your product) and expect support to untangle it. Been there, seen that.

by SeptiumMMX

1/12/2025 at 3:15:31 AM

> The people that want those product features subsidize the people who don't

Surely any company doing that would be spending profits on less profitable customers which is not economically sensible. See the box on page 2 of https://regulationbodyofknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/201...

Cross-subsidisation can occur due to regulations or a company trying to monopolise a market.

Pricing a product depends on how much you can charge and variable costs, not so much on how much it cost to develop - which as you point out leads to price discrimination - where it looks like one group is subsidising the other but maybe not in reality.

I would like to see a model of the marginal costs and ideal decisions.

Deciding to build features for higher paying clients only makes profits if those features are paid for by those clients. Other clients might get those features but it isn't "subsidisation" - however I'm not sure what a better word is! It isn't free-riding or consumer surplus.

by robocat

1/12/2025 at 4:31:47 AM

It's called market segmentation. The classic analogy is airline seats.

Ultimately the job of the airline is to get me from A to B. They do just that for First Class and sub-economy. But for more money you can have snacks etc.

Airlines offer add-ons that cost them real money (checked bags) and things that don't (seat selection.) They allow the customer to decide which features they want and which they don't.

Not all seats generate the same profit, but all seats generate some profit above marginal cost. (Usually some number of seats needs to be filled before the flight makes a profit, but that's a different equation.)

With software there's naturally some segmentation, and so the smart company tries to capture that value. Equally some segments want different (expensive) things like Support (and can afford it) so that needs to be on the table to win that customer in the first place.

A segmented offering is inevitable, at which point you then have to decide who does the segmenting. The client? Or do you have a salesperson to help them?

There's no right answer, but usually it depends on the product price. If I'm buying an airline seat I can figure it out [1]. If I'm buying an airplane probably not.

[1] I'm old enough to have lived in a time when there were specialists necessary to buy an airline seat.

by bruce511

1/12/2025 at 3:17:05 AM

Support is one thing. There is absolutely no excuse for upcharging for SSO. None whatsoever. Any company that does this is a shitty company who deserves to go out of business for abusing their customers.

by bigstrat2003

1/12/2025 at 3:33:13 AM

So most companies are shitty companies that deserve to go out of business. Got it!

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 3:53:18 AM

Frankly I do t disagree with that statement. Modern corporations are looking more and more like a disease trying to infect all of humanity.

by TylerE

1/12/2025 at 3:55:06 AM

You get that you're arguing that companies shouldn't get a price break for not wanting SSO, right?

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 5:45:04 PM

That sounds fine to me. What makes you think that's self-evidently wrong?

In any product there's a thousand different features where offering a price break for not using that particular feature would be silly.

If anything, just considering the customer side of things, give a disincentive for not using something like SSO to reduce careless password use.

by Dylan16807

1/12/2025 at 4:05:10 AM

No, I'm arguing that most people would be better off is a large number of companies got the corporate death penalty. SSO is orthogonal.

by TylerE

1/12/2025 at 2:32:59 AM

What is amazing for me is that these sales tactics actually work, because many people want to be sold to in this way.

Do the direct approach with no bullsh*t, instant demo, meaningful trial period, easy onboarding, etc and lose those customers that expect the usual sales ride.

Source: I do the direct approach.

by jwr

1/12/2025 at 2:35:32 AM

Right; the thing here is: the author obviously knows the game (because they wink knowingly at it repeatedly). Given that: why are they ever getting on the phone with a sales engineer? You can just delete the emails.

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 4:47:24 PM

If you don’t, eventually your VP will hear that you are lacking such tool that they will tell you to deal with vendors X and Y, even if they don’t fix your problem. At least by proactively going after it, you can pick vendor Z, which despite having the same terrible process, at least it addresses your problems (until the imaginary limits apply).

by kassner

1/12/2025 at 4:19:24 AM

These tactics work when the sales get access to the manager or director first, close the deal, and have low level people manage the aftermath.

In the case described where a technical person is shielding the final decision makers, it's more of a gamble and will often fail.

by makeitdouble

1/12/2025 at 9:03:47 PM

So true.

At the same time you can make a career out of being persuasive enough in person to close deals that could not be done any other way.

These are not always mutually exclusive.

by fuzzfactor

1/12/2025 at 12:57:14 AM

Maybe I'm the outlier here, but 15 minutes to chat with a human about my use case and pricing is way more efficient than donking around in docs/trial product.

The only product I really want to punch in credit card info and GO is commodity software (e.g. AWS EC2 or a domain registration service.

I think wires sometimes get crossed in pricing/sales models, where an enterprise product gets priced like commodity software ... but that's usually a sign the company is immature. There shouldn't be a sales team for software that costs 2-3 figures. Software costing 5-6+ figures absolutely requires people in the sales/onboarding process, because a big part of what I'm paying for is support.

by grepLeigh

1/12/2025 at 1:37:43 AM

Maybe I’m not asking the right questions, but I consistently find that I get “Yes” answers in these calls, that turn out to actually be “No” in practice.

I think the problem is that we rarely want to know “can you meet this use case”, but rather “how well can you meet this use case”, and that’s hard to assess without putting your hands on the software.

by scarab92

1/12/2025 at 4:49:28 AM

Which is to say that the quality of the sales person matters.

If your sales department is staffed by people who got hired on Monday, and are on the phone by Friday, then frankly they're not worth much.

I've seen the opposite though where sales folk know more about the software than support folk. They're equipped to help you with choices, but also understand limits and high-cost areas. Yes you absolutely can get Custom Reports, but we absolutely charge for that. And the data you're looking for is on this built-in report....

Dealing with a good salesperson, who knows their stuff, and understands that truth and trust are important, is an amazing thing.

by bruce511

1/12/2025 at 2:59:18 AM

It's definitely a generational thing. I've been spammed so utterly often that I simply do not answer my phone for a non-contact (or the inevitable interview phone call. But less often with video calls these days). If it's important enough to contact me, it's important enough to leave a voice mail.

I don't really do these sale pitches often, but it's a similar mentality for a different reason. I simply want anything communicated in writing in case they try to say yes to put a foot in the door, but the small details say no.

by johnnyanmac

1/12/2025 at 3:11:07 AM

I presume you are an emergency contact for some people? Maybe a spouse, or a kid? Or even a friend? What's your contingency for when they are lying bleeding somewhere and someone can't reach you since they are not on your contact list?

by elevatedastalt

1/12/2025 at 3:20:16 AM

I'm not the guy you asked, but I also basically keep my phone in Do Not Disturb mode 24/7, meaning no calls, no texts, no notifications, ever. I choose when I have time to look at my messages, not the other party.

I'm not a doctor, and even if I was, I'll never be able to help them purely over the phone if they are "lying bleeding somewhere" and I'm not around. If my house is burning down and I'm away, what am I going to do about it remotely that a phone call will solve? I'm not a firefighter and I can't splash water over RF. If something happens at my kid's school, I'm not there, and even if I was, I probably wouldn't be able to do anything about it.

That being said, if someone really, really thinks that I can somehow help them over the phone in an emergency, despite my number not being 9-1-1, certain family and friend's numbers I allow to punch through DND and reach me.

by ryandrake

1/12/2025 at 4:55:53 AM

My phone is on silent 100% of the time. (With small exceptions when I'm expecting a call.)

I might like to be informed of emergencies, but I'm not a first responder. If you are bleeding phone 911, not me.

To be fair, my mom sends my wife a message to tell me to "check my phone" if she needs me :)

Each person finds their own level of intrusion they want from their device. I've picked mine. You pick yours.

by bruce511

1/12/2025 at 4:25:45 AM

Not particularly, no. But I imagine they would simply say "Johnny it's X, call me. It's urgent". (Scammers are bad, but I've never been tricked with that kind of line).

If I'm being frank, that extra minute for me to respond probably won't change their fate if they are indeed bleeding out somewhere.

by johnnyanmac

1/12/2025 at 5:35:02 AM

Yeah, if you answer calls from random numbers something unsettling usually happens like some Indian guy yelling at me about how the IRS wants their money and the cops are on the way to my house (punchline: he can make it stop if I give him my bank account information). Unfortunately, it works on the kind of people who answer phone calls.

by datavirtue

1/12/2025 at 3:54:38 AM

One could ensure their spouse or child knows about 911 in America or similar service in other countries, which is, of course, what should be called in such a circumstance firstly anyway. Also, people generally have such numbers as contacts in their phone ... I don't know why I'm explaining it; this just seems like common sense ...

by dinkumthinkum

1/12/2025 at 5:57:55 AM

Emergency calls often come from people NOT in your contacts. That's why you provide emergency contacts on forms. If something goes wrong at work for example, someone from the office would call, not your spouse themselves.

by elevatedastalt

1/12/2025 at 12:12:59 PM

And how will that not be important enough to leave a voice message about?

by OJFord

1/12/2025 at 12:43:28 PM

blue-collar, unemployed (NEET, even), my oldest kids, PhDs i've known personally for decades, white collar workers - an incomplete list of everyone i called in 2024 with a full voicemailbox.

i try to tell people about the "two calls in a minute lets it go thru" feature because as of yet the autodialers don't know about it or have it implemented.

by genewitch

1/12/2025 at 2:50:03 PM

They're probably not also people who don't answer their phone, preferring either to have a voice message or nothing (because it isn't important) then.

I do the same as commenter up-thread, my voicemail inbox is empty. Sometimes I let a call ring out and then listen to the message immediately, I just don't want to have to deal with it synchronously. Then if it's 'I have a number of opportunities that seem like a great fit for you' I can just delete it and move on with my day, not have to try to say no-bye politely before hanging up, for example.

Someone with a full inbox is more likely someone who does the opposite - they'll never listen to their messages because they want to talk to someone, you'd have to call them back anyway so no harm it's full. (Or they'd call you from the missed call, not because they heard your message.)

by OJFord

1/12/2025 at 3:17:26 PM

> Or they'd call you from the missed call, not because they heard your message.

people with professional and PhD with full mailboxes do this, with jitter of up to hours.

the last full voicemail i hit i was called back nearly immediately, and they said "what, i just delete all my voicemails, if i call it says no new no saved"

There's a reason i'm harping on specific elements so much, because i don't think voicemail is magic, i guess.

do these people have voicemail boxes like this (nsfw language, a bit. idk. it's art.): https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/NSFW_voicemail_...

by genewitch

1/12/2025 at 1:03:10 AM

I don't really disagree. The problem is outreach when you're clearly mostly researching something whether to do with computers or something else. One travel company is particular was pretty aggressively reaching out because I downloaded a couple brochures.

by ghaff

1/12/2025 at 9:18:53 AM

> If I really, really care about your product, I’ll contact the 300 people I need on my side to get it approved. This process will take at least a month. Why? Who knows—it just always does. If I work for a Fortune 500 company, it’ll take a minimum of three months, assuming everything goes perfectly.

This pretty much chimes with my experiences getting anything that costs more than my boss can readily expense. Purchase agreements in large companies are pure hell.

by Simon_O_Rourke

1/12/2025 at 10:24:09 AM

Also sometimes for things that cost amounts I could easily expense

I've been going through a purchase order process for a bunch of patch cables and adapters so cheap I could even expense them without a receipt. It's taking months. They're being delivered by air freight. My heart and soul are aching.

by bjackman

1/12/2025 at 3:59:37 PM

Honest question, why are you going through that purchase order process if you could easily expense them?

by einsteinx2

1/12/2025 at 7:25:25 PM

Our company has a policy that regardless of expense and approval limits, certain things must always be done a certain way - "libraries that will end up in our software", and other things that the business "may depend on" - not saying that's the case here, but I can see it.

by FireBeyond

1/12/2025 at 10:52:14 PM

Ah ok yeah makes sense, what a PITA.

by einsteinx2

1/12/2025 at 4:28:01 AM

I tell people selling devtools that if you find yourself on a sales call with a single software engineer, something has probably gone wrong (as described in this article).

However if you're on a call with two EMs, a couple engineers, a security engineer, and a product manager, you're on the right call.

A single engineer very likely wants a PLG (product led growth) experience, sign up, read some docs, make a few API calls, and then punch in a credit card when they're ready. But you don't sell a $500k deal (usually) without some phone calls and a deck.

by cco

1/12/2025 at 4:08:06 AM

I pride myself on never having paid for, recommended, or endorsed any product or service with "Contact Us For a Quote"-pricing.

I have no desire to be in your fucking sales funnel.

by stackghost

1/12/2025 at 5:18:35 AM

You aren't the customer.

by datavirtue

1/12/2025 at 5:33:19 AM

I'm in the same boat as the GP, and while I'm clearly also not the customer, that's not necessarily reflective of how much money is being forgone by missing out on my business. Oh well, their loss and the competition's gain.

by mitthrowaway2

1/12/2025 at 7:59:54 AM

I am the customer I refuse to engage with 99.9% of companies who have a pricing page that says “contact us” for every tier.

by staticautomatic

1/12/2025 at 8:26:57 AM

Then...you are not the customer. The customer for Contact Us is vastly different than the customer that can enter their credit card details and gain immediate access.

by satvikpendem

1/12/2025 at 8:33:31 AM

I honestly don’t understand what you mean. Is it that I don’t have the money or that I’m not dumb enough to “Contact Us”?

by staticautomatic

1/12/2025 at 10:21:18 PM

It's not about being "dumb" but about wanting to talk to a human and understanding the product before dropping thousands of dollars on it. As usual, it seems tech people cannot empathize with non-tech workers at their companies, which is ironic, as those exact salespeople are what provide the salaries for tech workers in essentially all enterprise B2B companies, which is a large portion of employers.

You are not the customer because you are not who is being targeted by the website. You don't have the ability to pay X thousand a year as an individual or even as a corporate spender, there are specific people in companies that buy software, and those are who these websites target. It is nothing personal, it's just that you are not the customer, no more than if you go to a ski resort and want to surf instead, asking why you can't surf at the ski resort.

by satvikpendem

1/13/2025 at 2:37:23 AM

False dichotomy. I want to talk to a human and learn about the product and have the money, though. I just don’t want to be forced to do that in order to learn a basic amount about what the product offers and how it works.

by staticautomatic

1/13/2025 at 2:45:30 AM

That's what the landing page is for, I don't understand what you're asking for. If you want to learn about the product from a human, then you have to, well, get on a call with a human. Sales calls are not usually to give you basic information, that is the job of the website and whatever research you do online before getting on a call. They are, in most of my experience, to ask questions about the product and to eventually get the process going for procurement from my company as a buyer.

by satvikpendem

1/13/2025 at 4:39:40 PM

I agree, but many of the software companies that force you to "talk to sales" don't actually have enough info on the site for buyers to conduct a basic evaluation of product capabilities. There's a difference between making someone talk to sales in order to buy the product and making them talk to sales in order to learn anything meaningful about it. A lot of the "you're not the customer" folks in this thread seem to imagine that only the former exists.

by staticautomatic

1/13/2025 at 5:19:04 PM

Sometimes that's also by design and can also signal that you're not the customer. For example, CIOs may hear of a product and are very willing to get on a call to learn more about a product rather than necessarily reading a landing page at all. This provides the opportunity for the company to teach a potential customer about how exactly it fits their specific use case rather than a more generic landing page (and some companies do have a solutions page with more pages for various specific industries precisely to combat this too), and also, well, to make the buyer interested enough to buy. People who want to learn more by themselves on the landing page are typically not buyers because CIO and VP level executives do absolutely want to learn even the basics from a human and be able to ask specific questions relating to their use case.

by satvikpendem

1/13/2025 at 8:01:52 PM

Maybe. I'm skeptical that everyone doing it is doing it so strategically.

by staticautomatic

1/13/2025 at 8:20:20 PM

If you are in enterprise companies and see these discussions, you can see that the shift from product-led to sales-led (ie, enterprise) is a pretty conscious decision that companies make, as they know exactly the type of persona they are trying to target.

by satvikpendem

1/12/2025 at 4:04:42 PM

For me it's a bit like typo in phishing/scam emails. If you think "oh my god this scam is so bad how can anyone fall for it" then you are probably not the target group.

by Cilvic

1/12/2025 at 11:06:39 AM

I disagree with them here, but I think their point is that they're aiming for a certain type of customer, and you aren't a good fit for their business.

Not every business wants every customer. Some businesses know they can do very well if they keep their costs-per-customer low and their revenue-per-customer high, even if they have to have fewer customers to do it.

Some of those "contact us" companies are in that situation. I think that most of them aren't, but wish they were.

by wccrawford

1/12/2025 at 10:41:46 PM

However, by leaving some customers to feed the competition, they're also providing an avenue for their competitors to grow stronger and also take away the customers they currently enjoy having.

In particular I find that Chinese companies are hungry for all business, more willing to provide up-front information, and more willing to send a direct quote no-questions-asked rather than scheduling a meeting with a sales rep. I'm not surprised when I see them win.

by mitthrowaway2

1/13/2025 at 5:20:55 PM

Yes, product led vs sales led growth. But note that even then, as the former grow larger and target more enterprise, they shift to a "contact us" model anyway over time, until yet another competitor comes in, rinse and repeat. Intercom has this model, their pricing used to be very simple and now it's not, because it's tailored to enterprise, and now a lot of upstart competitors exist with that simple pricing.

by satvikpendem

1/12/2025 at 12:21:36 PM

>Not every business wants every customer. Some businesses know they can do very well if they keep their costs-per-customer low and their revenue-per-customer high, even if they have to have fewer customers to do it.

So they forego customers that just want to pay $N amount of money to try&use their software/service in favor of customers that want touchy-feely phone support at every step?

by ginko

1/12/2025 at 2:03:23 PM

They forego the customers (like you) least likely to be vulnerable to soft-touch upselling, yes.

by lee_ars

1/13/2025 at 5:22:14 PM

Yes they do, because you will likely pay less than people who go through the sales process and can be convinced to pay much more. Sticker shock is a real thing, it is very difficult to convince someone to pay $10k for example through their credit card if they see that price on a landing page, whereas it is easier to convince them if they can talk to a real human in the process.

by satvikpendem

1/12/2025 at 9:43:24 AM

As far as I can tell it's tautological: you're not the customer because you're not clicking the link because you're not the customer, etc.

by dpkirchner

1/12/2025 at 2:10:29 PM

The customer who just wants to put in their CC# and buy the product isn't a pipeline customer. You can't come back to that customer every other quarter and take them out for golf and pump them for additional services based on the "strength" of your relationship. You don't have any opportunity to make an in-person upsell pitch at the customer who just wants to put in their CC# and go.

In-person sales work at least in part because salesbros are trained to handle and overcome objections. They do it in many ways, and most of those ways take advantage of the fact that people by and large tend to want to act agreeable and kind to each other kind of by default. If you opt for the in-person meeting, the salesbro knows they have the opportunity to guilt or nudge or suggest you into buying additional services, or a longer service agreement, or a higher SLA, or whatever.

So, OP isn't the customer because they're announcing they're not interested in the dance. Many (not all!) IT vendors prefer the dance because it makes more money.

I say this as a former presales engineer for EMC (before it was EMC/DELL), serving large enterprise named accounts in the Houston area. If my boss saw me in the office, he'd kick me out and tell me I should be out taking clients out to lunch or to Astros games or whatever. I spent probably $2-3k/week on entertainment, and it was basically imaginary money to EMC, because if me and my salesbro blew $20-30k hooking a client, we were going to be doing it on a $2-3 million Symmetrix deal with 70-80% margin.

So yeah. OP isn't a customer because they don't want to play, and (most, not all!) companies can extract more revenue out of customers who DO play.

by lee_ars

1/13/2025 at 5:23:36 PM

Indeed, like I mentioned in another comment, if you saw a $10k pricing model on a landing page, you will be extremely likely to not buy it, but if you went through a human-led sales process, your chances of buying go up astronomically. That is why sales exists and why companies have sales teams.

by satvikpendem

1/12/2025 at 1:59:23 AM

> I start to wonder if I should’ve just reverse-engineered your tool myself.

Ever since I started taking this advice instead of going through a sales process (I really only need this inflicted on me a single time in my life), I have been a lot happier. We also stick the counter at around $50k saved per year for applications that are essentially fancy crud forms.

The best part is it bypasses all the complicance requirements, since if it’s written in your company it can’t possibly be bad.

by Aeolun

1/12/2025 at 7:31:07 AM

> Chances are, I signed up to see if your tool can do one specific thing. If it doesn’t, I’ve already mentally moved on and forgotten about it. So, when you email me, I’m either actively evaluating whether to buy your product, or I have no idea why you’re reaching out.

Let me get this straight: author clicks around on B2B SaaS with un-focused sales models (both the heavy account rep / sales engineer sales-driven process, and the free trial product-driven process) because they want One Small Feature that's too big to build themselves (but still small enough for someone else to build and open-source, sustainably), knowing that expressing interest to purchase will result in an Enterprise Sales Cycle yet being pissed off that it resulted in an Enterprise Sales Cycle?

Methinks the author doth protest too much to cover up their own misaligned expectations. If you want One Small Feature then it's either covered by the product-led pricing (i.e. credit card based, no Enterprise Sales Cycle) or it's not. And if it's not, if you have to click a "Contact Us" button, which, being an industry veteran, you know will launch an Enterprise Sales Cycle, then maybe what you're asking for isn't really One Small Feature, because you're going to pay Enterprise Pricing for your One Small Feature, and so maybe this isn't the vendor to get it from.

The Enterprise Sales Cycle exists because the number of people who can put Enterprise Pricing (~$25+k/year) on a corporate credit card, without any internal checks, is close to zero. The Enterprise Sales Cycle exists precisely to align the many stakeholders whose alignment is necessary to sign larger deals. If you have a corporate card, are looking for a solution that you can buy independently, then you are not in the vendor's market and you're doing everybody a huge disservice by trying to force a deal anyway. Go find a vendor that actually targets your market segment.

by solatic

1/12/2025 at 7:53:03 AM

Have you never interacted with companies like Datadog or LaunchDarkly? If you think signing up for the cheap plan will stop the Enterprise Sales Calls you're dead wrong.

by mvdtnz

1/12/2025 at 8:19:08 PM

Of course, and you're free to ignore the emails from whoever they assign to you as an account exec. Half the time, the account exec didn't even write the cold email themselves, it was some service that blasts the cold emails for them.

by solatic

1/12/2025 at 7:50:09 AM

I agree but as a customer it’s still worth asking. I recently asked a salesperson if I could get access to some enterprise features on a PAYG plan because I literally couldn’t go through the procurement motions fast enough for my needs. They said yes and just had an engineer toggle some feature flags on my account.

by staticautomatic

1/12/2025 at 5:54:22 AM

We are an IT company providing services such as VoIP. RingCentral is our preferred VoIP service, they are great but I am about to switch to another provider very soon unless they stop calling me with their Filipino call centers asking for super long calls. I can't even hang up they are extremely aggressive. I told them nearly 20 times not to call me, I know their services, and I can call them if help is needed. No, they must have a call and must find a time.

If anyone is reading from RingCentral: you are seriously pushing your customers away with these shitty calls. Just stop harassing your own customers.

by system2

1/12/2025 at 3:36:26 AM

I scream into the void after reading this post: "Please give even a 10th of that money you wasted on that SaaS to the maintainer(s) of the OSS alternative, even while you're trialing it internally!"

by smashah

1/12/2025 at 9:21:05 AM

Would never happen. I was working for a company which for C++ projects used open source CMake package manager called Hunter. Thousands of packages (ours and third-party) for multiple platforms were causing building and linking problems constantly. Literally every day devops would waste hours on those issues. Many of the problems come from our not-understanding of the build processes and some were Hunter bugs so we were happy to jump to every new release. And one day the Hunter maintainer make announcement that he will abandon the project if someone would not help him financially. I pointed this out to my manager. He said that it's very unfortunate but he would need to talk to his manager who would need to talk to next manager and so on, some finance department would need to allocate funds for that but they would not do that without the approval of some other department and so on. So my manager said we must wait, see what Hunter maintainer would do and if he really abandon the project then we will think what next. Ruslo (Hunter maintaner) abandoned the project so I told my manager that we should simply contact Ruslo and try to hire him as he clearly would be the right person to solve all our building problems. Guess what... My manager would need to contact his manager and so on, and so on, so nothing was done.

by Nezghul

1/13/2025 at 4:00:48 AM

Truly a sad state of affairs.

Please check out thanks.dev to possibly get your company to start paying OSS Devs that they rely on.

(No affiliation)

by smashah

1/12/2025 at 12:44:34 AM

We’re doing SOMETHING LIFE-CHANGING with AI and you’re GOING to show up to this gmeet in 15 minutes!

Love, Oracle

by dole

1/12/2025 at 2:24:47 AM

This article rings so true.

There are lots of ways to make a lot of money selling a service. The best way IMO is to build a service that is easy to integrate and customize, delights your customers, and has a simple pricing model. There should be no surprises in any of these traits. Customers will be loyal because you’ve made their lives easier - you didn’t just “solve their problem”, you solved their problem in a way that doesn’t require them to change anything else about their business to adapt to you.

The other way involves minimum viable products, basic features only available at top tier pricing, only have a single way to integrate and no meaningful customization. You make your product a black box that your customers can only escape with Herculean effort and lots of begging on many time consuming phone calls.

It seems like startup culture somehow funnels everyone into the second category.

by efitz

1/12/2025 at 2:38:43 AM

If you're not deeply steeped in startup business model lore, the search query you want here is [product led growth], the very-fashionable trend of go-to-market and business models that admit your preferred way of marketing products. Tailscale, Slack, Notion, and Dropbox (at least, early Dropbox) are all big examples of PLG startups.

This model works especially well when your early (pre-series-B go-to-market) is not big companies (say, 1000+ employees).

by tptacek

1/12/2025 at 5:42:16 AM

Your first model works for some products/industries doesn’t work with others where second model works better. Generally, medium/large businesses have long, drawn out processes for buying things coupled with politics and limited pool of folks with purchasing power so your first model will almost never work if you’re selling to those

by dilyevsky

1/12/2025 at 6:25:20 AM

A big company assigns me a new account rep every ~six months, each time resulting in an email from the new account rep introducing themself and trying to schedule a call to “learn more about me needs” (read: upsell me). Not sure if they intentionally rotate account reps without interactions just to have a reason to email. These emails usually promptly go to trash, but the one I got this week grabbed my attention because they somehow invented a new name for me. Took me a while to realize my email on file is <their-company-abbrevation>@<mydomain> and they picked a name similar to <their-company-abbreviation>. But every previous account rep at least knew my name. What the actual fuck.

by oefrha

1/12/2025 at 12:35:40 AM

This is why I stopped working at companies that build dev tools. Building sales/marketing tools because they love having anything built for them lol

by thexumaker

1/12/2025 at 12:52:14 AM

The sales person does not have any incentive for that. They need their name to be associated with the purchase.

by mhx1138

1/12/2025 at 12:29:16 AM

pretty accurate. sales teams are kind of the worst, but buying from the company founders are fun.

i wonder if there’s a world coming where the oss and the company become the same person.

by randall

1/12/2025 at 3:50:40 AM

I agree with most of this, except the last part.

It is true that CodeSquish probably works better than the paid product, but it only solves 20% of the problems that the paid product does. You are in the lucky group of 5-10% of all people that the paid product targets whose requirements are fully covered with that 20%.

For the remaining 90%, it's either the paid product, or another free/open source product which may or may not exist.

Obviously there are exceptions to this, but in general, commercial products are bloated for a reason. People really need 20% of the functionality as the saying goes, but everybody needs a different 20%.

by selcuka

1/12/2025 at 4:45:42 AM

I'm currently looking at purchasing a commercial product because CodeSquish has a fatal error and hasn't been updated in two years because the guy who maintains it has vanished off the face of the earth.

by munchler

1/12/2025 at 11:30:45 AM

Have you considered paying a developer to fix the bug? It might be less hassle.

by Symbiote

1/13/2025 at 2:25:01 PM

That sounds like Software Product Management and how many businesses can handle that?

by jagged-chisel

1/12/2025 at 11:10:06 PM

> the guy who maintains it has vanished off the face of the earth

How would you pay such a person?

by selcuka

1/13/2025 at 7:10:55 AM

It's open source — many developers would be willing to take on the work.

Start by asking those who have contributed before, and any that use the software (if there's a forum, mailing list, Reddit sub etc). If it's on GitHub look at any forks.

by Symbiote

1/12/2025 at 1:41:17 PM

What kind of software is it in this case?

by antonvs

1/12/2025 at 6:25:03 AM

> After wasting precious moments of my life with an LLM that links me to the same useless documentation, I’ll finally be allowed to email a real person

This too is already rapidly becoming utopia-land.

by tpoacher

1/12/2025 at 4:42:02 AM

Not wanting to admit ignorance, I’ll make up a reason on the spot. Later, in the bathroom, I’ll Google CodeSquish and discover it does everything I need, costs nothing, and is 100x more performant—even though it’s maintained by a single recluse who only emerges from their Vermont farm to push code to their self-hosted git repo.

I've built this exact open source platform, for "nearly everything you'll ever need" for full-stack web apps (from profiles, to access, control, notifications, payments, credits, even videoconferencing and livestreaming). You can build your own Facebook or Twitter pretty quickly.

Here it is: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform

But I haven't really marketed it, at all. Almost no one on HN has heard of it. Only if someone takes the time to poke around will they be impressed, start to use it, etc.

Even more than that, I started a new GitHub project recently as I plan to release v2.0 after many years. So all the stars on the original project are not even on the new one. (The old one is still on my github.)

And here is the documentation: https://qbix.com/platform/guide

So this is the extreme opposite ... I haven't started trying to market it or sell it to the world or even attract developers to it. But it's there if someone bothers to look.

by EGreg

1/12/2025 at 1:09:30 AM

Oof. If I never have to endure another hard-selling enterprise vendor salescritter, it'll be too soon. Mat has really nailed the agony of the experience here.

by bityard

1/12/2025 at 8:00:51 AM

He never considers or mentions donating to that open source tool he went with. Funny.

by dt3ft

1/12/2025 at 9:01:40 AM

I find Apple's 'Hide My Email' service invaluable for avoiding the first part of this problem: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078

Very easy to deactivate an address when I decide I don't want to hear from them anymore.

by keybits

1/12/2025 at 1:54:49 AM

The right person for the author’s role is a person who enjoys the process the author describes.

Someone who wishes procurement reduced to online documentation and credit cards is going to hate their job if it requires engaging with high touch sales processes.

Maybe they need a purchase team partner - the analog of the salesperson in a salesperson-sales engineer team.

by brudgers

1/12/2025 at 3:12:42 AM

On the one hand, business majors are always talking efficiency, optimizing the placement of soap dispensers to shave every possible second off the bathroom break of workers.

Yet at the same time, when faced with a complaint about excessive unnecessary sales processes, the solution is to add more people.

by kuschku

1/12/2025 at 7:19:47 AM

My major was philosophy.

by brudgers

1/12/2025 at 2:32:06 AM

... because it's unthinkable that the "high touch sales processes", which add zero value and suck for everybody other than whoever's taking home the huge commission, should change.

by Hizonner

1/12/2025 at 8:24:30 AM

The author describes the unhappy flow when there is nothing he wants to buy, he should have just stonewalled them or removed himself from the mailing list when the feature he needed is not there. If the feature is there and he want it, the story goes totally differently. But both cases are going to start with a call. The big mistake here is taking the call or giving sales a whiff of your interest given the volume/commission model, a smart salesperson (unfortunately somewhat rare) is going to simply move on, saving time on both sides.

A more happy flow exists, author signs up for trial, he can't find or is unsure if feature exists during trial or reading docs, he asks sales/sales engineer where it is, salespeople show him or speak to PM to get him a timeline, later the feature he needs goes into beta and sales reconnects and demos, starts trial using beta. Sales helps draft the internal proposal/implementation plan to convince his boss and the hundreds of others needed for the sale. They buy when it goes GA.

by Rastonbury

1/12/2025 at 7:27:31 AM

This is true in general, and despite not being in a position to make big sales happen, I still get at least 3–4 requests per week for these kinds of calls. I understand that in a world dominated by noise, you have to create more noise to get attention, but my time is limited.

Plus, when salespeople ask how I’m using their product, I need to prepare because, most of the time, I don’t remember how I was using it. That project isn’t the center of my world.

That said, I still accept calls from people I know in the field. I recently had two calls with Glauber Costa, the founder of Turso, and in the process of scheduling another one with the Pydantic Logfire folks. But none of them are sales reps, and they’re usually fun to talk to, so I’m happy to do it.

by rednafi

1/12/2025 at 4:34:19 AM

And now, I’m stuck on your mailing list forever. I get notifications about all your new releases and launches, which forces me to make a choice every time:

• “Obviously, I don’t care about this anymore.”

• “But what if they’ve finally added the feature I wanted?”

This gives me an idea... how about reaching out to developers and ask them what their experience was, which features they'd like the most, and/or subscribe to when they will be launched, to be the first to try them and give feedback? Even this guy would go for that.

by EGreg

1/12/2025 at 4:57:59 AM

Everyone has their price, and mine is a minimum $50 gift card if you want me to have an introductory call with your team. Also accept basketball tickets, steak dinner, or an Apple Watch. I’ll always say we’re considering your product. I am the technical decision maker and report to the CIO. Thank you for the introduction, I’ll reply one more time yo follow up with a reason why we can’t move forward (most of the time)

by icameron

1/12/2025 at 1:35:59 AM

>I will then endure a series of demos showcasing functionality I’ll never use because I’m only here for one or two specific features.

I've sat on a lot of sales calls and I get these feels. But when it comes to selling to people who are NOT the author, managers, execs, decision making architecture astronauts ... that long list of features and functionality really do seem to sell the product. Not that they'll use them...

by duxup

1/12/2025 at 1:53:47 AM

I've been on both sides of this and it is so true.

by bhouston

1/12/2025 at 2:40:53 AM

At its core sales = harassment

by UltraSane

1/12/2025 at 3:58:19 AM

>“Hey, I saw you were checking out our service. Let me know if you have any questions!”

I had this happen for a service we already had implemented at my company. I created a new account just to make sure it was working because we had a few say the site or login was being blocked by our security software. Even after I deleted the new account I was getting emails from them.

by Suppafly

1/12/2025 at 10:39:35 AM

Oracle won't stop emailing me, or give me a place to unsubscribe... all because I wanted to try one of their VPSes on a 30-day trial like 5-10 years ago, that I never even used.

They called me after the 30 days and I even told them I didn't use it. Yet they still insist on emailing me every 3 weeks about some security policy junk.

by nubinetwork

1/12/2025 at 4:50:12 PM

The frustration of attempting to buy anything in a large organisation is so great for both sides that it prohibits the purchase of cheap tools to help with small jobs. They might have saved time if you can buy them in a few hours but since it will take months nobody will bother.

by fancyfredbot

1/12/2025 at 8:22:11 AM

> Since your mailing list is apparently the only place on Earth to find out if Platform A has added Feature X (because putting release notes somewhere accessible is apparently too hard), …

Won’t work for every product, but I’m pushing through with my prototype and that (i.e. release notes) is something to consider.

by xlii

1/12/2025 at 2:41:39 AM

10 years after I left a company, new relic still calls me twice a year in the hope of selling something there.

by nraynaud

1/12/2025 at 7:43:37 AM

I can’t help but feel like one of the author’s last experiences was with Okta or Auth0.

by junto

1/12/2025 at 7:08:20 AM

Pretty hilarious. Both accurate and entertaining. Now I also want to use CodeSquish.

by mongol

1/12/2025 at 4:46:40 PM

Side note - working at Google once used to be a sign of competence, but I would never hire anyone but has worked there in the last 6 years as all of the products have degraded significantly.

by silexia

1/12/2025 at 8:11:06 AM

This same pattern is replicated in LinkedIn, where depending on your position in a company, you get flooded with connection requests to only sell you stuff. I hate it from the bottom of my heart.

by kookamamie

1/12/2025 at 2:45:20 AM

Recently my team was doing a PoC on some new software and we connected it to one of our hosted databases. Not even an hour later the vendor for that database pinged me on Slack and was like “hey we saw you connected that thing, you know we have stuff that does that too would LOVE to set up a call”

I know thats their job but goddamn, this kind of competitive spying is scummy af lol

by pram

1/12/2025 at 2:49:37 AM

Years ago my friend put me as a reference on his resume. I got a call asking about him, but then ending with... are you looking at other opportunities?

...and I realized it was the recruiter, probably not interested in my friend so much as recruiting off the reference list.

it's everywhere.

by m463

1/12/2025 at 7:28:41 AM

I once got a call to recruit me to the company that I was working for! Recruiters are worse than used car salesmen, it is just volume and quantity for them. And I am not even some hot shot engineer, just mediocre run of the mill dev

by akudha

1/12/2025 at 11:12:56 AM

Being respectful to your SaaS users attention and time proves to be detrimental to your business.

The choice is to be deferential and poor, or bold and reach.

So far I am poor.

by bilinguliar

1/12/2025 at 4:14:42 AM

I just learned that CodeSquish is a real product

https://www.codesquish.com/

by ninju

1/12/2025 at 5:04:08 AM

Book a call!

by tjpnz

1/12/2025 at 2:51:52 PM

When working as the head of engineering at a start-up, I would get dragged into this process on the sales side. I would sit there cringing at all of the bonkers crap the Sales Engineer or Solutions Architect was spewing at the customer.

The senior technical person from the customer would ask me a couple hard questions and I would be pretty honest in my responses. Afterwards our Sales Success Customer Account Manager would be unhappy with me, but at least I wouldn't have to go to another one of those meetings for a while.

The deal would go ahead anyway because our management had convinced their management to make the purchase even though what we were offering didn't really meet their needs. They would only need to pay us if we actually delivered so they weren't taking a lot of risk, other than wasting their time, and we got to make a multi-million dollar "booking."

In the end I would either get along with their senior technical person pretty well because we could be honest with each other, or else they would despise me for being unable to deliver what my sales people had promised (Hi Sven!).

by redsparrow

1/12/2025 at 1:42:21 PM

To all people providing business services (email security software comes to mind as an example), PLEASE for the love of God provide a self-service portal so I can buy your product without having to talk to your salespeople.

by LorenDB

1/12/2025 at 5:13:20 AM

OMG, this is us.

by datavirtue

1/12/2025 at 12:37:31 AM

Salesforce has entered the chat.

by kylehotchkiss

1/12/2025 at 12:51:33 PM

I had an argument on LinkedIn about something data engineering related and the guy literally sent me a DM with his calendly and said pick a time for us to continue the debate.

What. The. Actual. $&%#?

by gigatexal

1/12/2025 at 7:28:29 AM

> And now, I’m stuck on your mailing list forever.

Companies, don't do this. After I've attempted unsubscription, I flag every single email from you as spam.

by riiii

1/12/2025 at 8:23:02 AM

Immediately remove yourself from the list with:

"I'm a European citizen. Please erase me from your list as per the GDPR"

by b800h

1/12/2025 at 4:49:11 AM

"Hey I got some great news. Got 20 minutes for a call later today?"

by caseydm