Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheeshkebab | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wonder about what’s more profitable in B2B space - product or consulting/contracting. Doing the latter I manage to pull in more in 3 months what this guy generated it sounds like in 3 years.

That gives me a pause everytime I want to sink 3 months of my time into some startup idea.

View on HN

If one is sufficiently skilled, consulting pays much better in the short term and carries almost no risk. Building a product pays negatively (costs money in the form of expenses and investment) in the short term, and is very risky (the product may or may not actually get built, even if it does it may or may not fit the market, even if that happens, it may or may not generate sufficient revenues, and then there’s the risk of the company going out of operations due to internal/external problems). The founder that wrote the article this comment thread is discussing stumbled at the final stage - company went out of ops due to internal problems.

As someone that has done both, you might be right. Consulting is way more profitable, but the thing is that you basically are working for someone else, and you can scale it as far as you can fit it on your calendar or hiring.

But with a product you can sell 1,000% of what you had yesterday, the schedules might be a little tight since B2B expects at least a few sales meetings.

So it has its pros and cons. And from my experience (and other's, both friends and clients who want to create something), it's unlikely to have something sellable in 3 months.

> As someone that has done both, you might be right.

I don't think he has done both. He wouldn't have asked in such a case.

It seems from the sentence that he himself has done both, he is not claiming that the original comment's author has done both.

Accenture and PwC et al show there's unicorns in consulting, but not many.

There's also the in-between/both approach - Oracle and Salesforce are both "Here buy our shit!", followed up very quickly with "Here, you need our services department and a support contract to make that shit work".

Increasingly, Microsoft seems to be taking the same approach, at least with its Azure line of products where you can buy “service” separately from the actual cloud product.

Not _super_ surprising. AWS has spawned an entire industry who provide addon services/support for it (and if I were those companies, I'd be waiting for the Bezos shoe to drop and eat the entire space's profit). The company I work for has a bunch of clients who outsource all of their AWS capability - usually in insanely expensive and inflexible ways...

Of course, even companies like Salesforce, SAP have little cottage industries sprung up around them that do the “requirement analysis”, setup, maintenance, etc.

I always wonder if it’d not be effectively cheaper to hire a parttime sysadmin to manage one’s own servers than all this trouble companies now go to with AWS/Azure.

A while back, I had a good look at the AWS offerings, and they were alluring enough to someone in the early stages of anything. But the initial knowledge-barrier is not too low (there are even courses on AWS) - so why wouldn’t I instead to use my preexisting Unix skills to do it by hand; and why wouldn’t a beginner choose to learn the (not too hard, and IMO of comparable complexity as AWS) basics of handling storage etc in Unix than to pay a vendor. The moment one is at even intermediate scale, having one’s own setup seems more practical.

Because the full value of AWS or other offerings is in not maintaining the servers and backbones they run on.

I think Rackspace is now entirely on top of AWS, whereas before they used to be a competitor in the cloud space.

Might I ask for a source on that?

I know that they provide services for AWS, but they still have their own offerings just the same. There’s no real reason for Rackspace to dump its massive existing infrastructure and move to AWS. So the only new thing is a service department for AWS customers.

A sales person from the company contacted me a while ago to offer services, Jessica De La Garza <Jessica.DeLaGarza@rackspace.com> and talked about their services. They have always been about their "Fanatical Support"

Yes, they do support AWS instances on behalf of clients. It is indeed a new service they’ve added to their roster.

But their own servers, networks, all product offerings are what they were.

The sales woman must have taken a bit of liberty with her words. I haven't used them in a couple of years, I did really like their "Cloud Sites" offering they had.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com