Re:Uber Lays Off 400
by aresant on Monday July 29, 2019 @05:49PM
(#20559826)
A really simple way to think about this.
The promise of software at scale is that the marginal costs of selling one single additional unit are basically $0.00
As a result if your product sells for $500 you can spend $495 and still make money.
This leads to all sorts of adventures in driving that additional marginal unit sale such as:
- Localization - eg Microsoft Office is available in 102 languages! So now we need a local market product manager, sales team, distribution team, translator, QA, etc, etc.
- Enterprise - Huge swaths of money spent on conferences, thought leadership, any bullshit you can think of to potentially get a decision maker CTO to befriend somebody on your sales team.
- Government! - Selling to the gov't is extremely profitable but extremely long and complex sales cycle. Now we're hiring lobbyists, contract specialists, etc, etc.
- Support - Happy users are your mostly likely next buyers
The promise of software at scale is that the marginal costs of selling one single additional unit are basically $0.00
As a result if your product sells for $500 you can spend $495 and still make money.
This leads to all sorts of adventures in driving that additional marginal unit sale such as:
- Localization - eg Microsoft Office is available in 102 languages! So now we need a local market product manager, sales team, distribution team, translator, QA, etc, etc.
- Enterprise - Huge swaths of money spent on conferences, thought leadership, any bullshit you can think of to potentially get a decision maker CTO to befriend somebody on your sales team.
- Government! - Selling to the gov't is extremely profitable but extremely long and complex sales cycle. Now we're hiring lobbyists, contract specialists, etc, etc.
- Support - Happy users are your mostly likely next buyers
etc etc