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Re:Launch HN: Coursedog (YC W19) – Resource Planning Softwar... by marcell on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @01:27PM (#20812267)
Curious what is your sales process like. While these universities obviously would benefit from your solution, I also wonder to what degree they’re willing to move to a bette system, and if they’re willing to do it a a pace that works for you as a startup.
Re:Launch HN: Coursedog (YC W19) – Resource Planning Softwar... by jwenig on Tuesday August 27, 2019 @01:47PM (#20812494)
Our sales are very outbound: personalized cold emails & cold calls have been very effective for us. We also attend lots of tradeshows and have found some success with webinars and digital ads.

To your point about moving to a better system - it's been an age old critique that universities are a slow moving bureaucracy.

We'd argue that the slow pace is a more or less an allergic reaction to the poor solutions that universities have been force-fed over the past 20+ years: including but not limited to incessant acquisitions, companies going under and products that don't work or integrate well.

Given that university administrators often work within a school for 20+ years, you end up with a lot of people who are just flat out skeptical of new products.

The good thing is that going from 0 to 1 product within a university is exponentially more difficult than 1 to 2 or 1 to an entire back-office solution. Now that we've got a couple of strong references and high NPS scores, we think that up-selling and cross-selling is going to help us break down these traditional barriers. Rather than rip and replace, why not go down the line with us and rebuild?