News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Look like the brand you want to be. Parent comment

Re:Look like the brand you want to be by danmaz74 on Wednesday October 05, 2011 @11:48AM (#3076153)
It looks to me like these two posts are perfectly complementary. One is right if you can only sell to big customers - and if you sell a $50,000 email appliance, you're not going to sell it to small businesses or individuals.

The other one is about selling to small businesses (and the same could be true for consumers). It only makes sense that you should use two completely different approaches.

One important corollary of the first article is, imho, that you should never start a business geared towards the big guys if don't have enough investor money, even if your technology isn't so expensive to develop. You will be very difficult to be taken seriously otherwise. And this resonates with my personal experience with multinational customers at my day job.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Look like the brand you want to be by SoftwareMaven on Wednesday October 05, 2011 @12:13PM (#3076246)
It's not just about the size of the sale. It is also about what you are selling and how critical that is to the company's day-to-day operations. If your code review tool goes down for a few hours, meh. If your email goes down for a few hours, the world is on fire and somebody is losing their job.

In the later case, companies want to feel that the "if" scenario will never happen. It's not that outages can't happen, but, rather, that if an outage occurs, you will be taken care of. If UserVoice is your only support tool, you are unlikely to give that feeling.

[ Parent | on HN ]