Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

Some random responses:

- It's Google Wave, this time by ex-Facebookers!

- Software that messes with my email sucks.

- It looks complicated.

- People use text files and whiteboards because you can wipe it and start over and draw and connect stuff and use colors and...

- If their plan is to build something sexy and get acquired, they'll probably succeed just because of their Facebook past.

- If their plan is to build a product and live off it, they'll probably pull it off because most other software sucks so bad and is limited.

- But, based on the video, they won't fundamentally "solve" the problem they're attacking, their software will just be another context (like text files, stickies, emails, wikies, bug tracking, etc.)

- Investors always ask at the end of your pitch, "How are you different than X?" and "Why will you succeed where X has failed?". I didn't really see the answer in this video.

- Their virality plan sounds interesting in the context of Enterprise Software.

Hopefully I'm wrong!

Yes, I don't get it either. Ozzie's Groove was more revolutionary.

What virality plan?

About 3/4th into the video the guy says they're planning to attack companies from the bottom-up by designing for, allowing and enabling individual employees to start using it by themselves and then share their stuff. I think even if their software fails, if they can come up with a model for this that works, that would be a big deal and enable other startups. I know I'm already thinking about this.

At least, that's what I got from fast-forwarding, it's an hour long presentation.

Yammer is commonly cited as an example of a company which does this. As far as I know, there's no public data on how well this particular tactic has worked for them, but that doesn't stop every hacker/product entrepreneur from citing them in pitches to dodge questions about how they are going to recruit and manage an enterprise sales team.

This is exactly how Yammer has acquired a large percentage of their customers. It's their competitive advantage, and the reason their sales force doesn't largely subsume the rest of the company. The reason it has worked for them is that they gained a lot of momentum from winning TechCrunch50, which caused companies everywhere to try the product. That's not to say they've avoided having a sales force; it's crucial to the company's success.

I guess Yammer is positioned more of a communications tools (blogging/tweeting/messaging) whereas Asana is more of a productivity tool (issue tracking/todos/projects)?

My point is that trying to spread an app aimed at enterprises using a large-scale bottom-up approach seems to be a relatively unexplored approach. I don't know how Yammer is doing, but I have never seen one of my business partners or co-workers use Yammer and thus be exposed to it (=bottom-up).

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