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?
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?