Comment by gk1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gk1 | Hacker News Reader

Agh.

April is terrific, and I agree that the right messaging and positioning can have disproportionately high impacts on revenue (speaking from experience with Netlify, Gravitational, and others), but this click-bait title is a huge disservice to April, other marketers, and founders who may be dissuaded from trying new messaging and positioning.

The actual story is that the person (April) was asked by a manager to interview a bunch of customers. When they brought back the data, the manager (or the team, collectively) acted on it by coming up with new product positioning.

Some years later, after countless product iterations and three acquisitions, the product landed at a tech giant that does $30B/year. The author speculates it was then responsible for $1B in revenue, though doesn't know for sure.

So...

It's fair to say "I was there early and it was neat to solve these problems for a DB that later ended up at SAP." But to imply that your work directly resulted to $1B in revenue--as this title does--is just nonsense. What the F*ck were the editors thinking.

Why so angry. The title reads:

> How I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1 billion in revenue

It doesn't say "How I single handedly repositioned" or even "How I repositioned". The author literally helped in the process that led to repositioning. By uncovering a key use-case for the product, which then became the key feature and selling point of the updated product.

And regarding the comment about $1B in revenue, is there any good reason not to give her the benefit of the doubt? She literally worked with the team and rubbed shoulders with them every day. A lot of non-public numbers get talked about casually at the water cooler.

There seems to be a trend where people are hyper-obsessed with nitpicking titles and calling out "clickbait". In this case, the article title is a pretty great representation of the article's contents - or at least as great as you can get in one sentence. I personally enjoyed the article, and was hoping to read a discussion about the main points raised in the article, or similar stories others may have. Instead, the top comment is an angry rant nitpicking the article's title.

Could not agree more. Thanks for posting your positive response.

Two points:

1. The title does not make huge claims directly, but strongly implies it. That's how I read it when I was skimming the front page of HN. It's like writing an article with the title "I taught Michael Jordan basketball" and then explain how you showed him how to throw a ball for 30 minutes when he was the 5 years old. Or the old maxim that if you are a cashier at McDonald's, you can technically say that you "process high-frequency cash transactions for multi-billion dollar company on rotating supply-demand cycle".

2. I don't like how the common advice for writing resume, which I can only presume reflects what hiring managers want to see in someone's resume, says you must quantify your achievements. You cannot just say I wrote the login system. You must somehow tie it to a business objective and achievement (increases sales by 7%, reduced support calls by 12%, etc). In reality, projects are often team efforts and except for certain niches such as sales and consulting, there is rarely a clear correlation between an individual employee's actions and business's results. I don't like writing pretending there is and writing it, and I don't like reading it.

I don’t know about pretending a correlation, but a common challenge for engineering and product ICs who are trying to become more senior or have a bigger impact is understanding how their work relates to the big picture. I often ask engineers why they are (to use your example) rewriting the login system, and is there is any way to quantify the results. This helps to avoid engineers polishing an already-round ball, and to have some kind of accountability for outcomes. If you are rewriting login to cut down on tech support calls or to make it work with third party auth or work with legacy enterprise garbage, all those reasons are tangible and possible to quantify.

> I don't like how the common advice for writing resume, which I can only presume reflects what hiring managers want to see in someone's resume, says you must quantify your achievements.

It's not about résumés but about how the skill of measuring/estimating one's own effectiveness/impact/productivity is positively correlated with successful outcomes and rate of progress in life in general.

Recall Mike Acton's principle questions[0] that a goal-orientated individual must answer:

>> - I can articulate precisely what problem I am trying to solve.

>> - I have articulated precisely what problem I am trying to solve.

>> - I have confirmed that someone else can articulate what problem I am trying to solve.

>> - I can articulate why my problem is important to solve.

>> - I can articulate how much my problem is worth solving.

[0]: https://www.dropbox.com/s/doiq8ovho1k9d4b/fired.pptx?dl=0

Or more cynically, keep on doing your thing at your core, but do know that people expect to hear stuff like that so consciously sit down and architect some answers to those things. You can reinterpret and rewrite the story later, but you need to have one. Also you don't have to get too attached to it and believe it too much. Think of it as your interface towards society. They cannot all have time to actually latch onto your inner person. You must present to them all the handles you want to be grabbable by.

> Or the old maxim that if you are a cashier at McDonald's, you can technically say that you "process high-frequency cash transactions for multi-billion dollar company on rotating supply-demand cycle".

Having read about 100 CVs in the past month, this made me chuckle. Yes, people actually word their CVs like this.

ngl, if I read that I'd be impressed at the sheer moxie and marketing ability

After the 50th one, the novelty wears off and it just smells desprate. Don't do, or reward, this bs.

Agreed.

Take any gosh-darn company on earth that's brought in $1bn in revenue.

Now take all of their employees.

Each of those employees has a story that could be titled:

How I helped xyz with abc that ended up with that company bringing in $1b in revenue.

The number of such employees in the whole world is somewhere between 10 million and 7 billion.

> if you are a cashier at McDonald's, you can technically say that you "process high-frequency cash transactions for multi-billion dollar company on rotating supply-demand cycle"

I'm not sure this is technically accurate. The transactions a cashier at McDonald's handles would usually be "for" the franchise where they work, not for McDonald's itself.

Replace it with Walmart, or imagine it is for someone who worked for one of the 7% of MacDonald's locations that are not franchised. The point still stands.

The numbers are not the point. In some sense it's exactly to weed out those who cannot just say A or B and stop at "well if you look at it like this then A, but perhaps B...". It's 12%, and that's it. You signal that you care about making money for your boss, which, however we twist it, is the reason and hope behind every hire.

Its a cultural thing. They fear ending up with a bunch of people who just want to have fun with elegant code and tech and polish some corner of the app for a esthetic satisfaction. They fear not even being able to communicate effectively about your role in the business.

Being able to say 12% is much better than not even thinking of trying to estimate it. Theoretically, a nuanced view would be even better but there is a time and place to be nuanced and witty and thats not on the HR desk.

Very valid counterpoint. It could by HN's latent bias against marketing types (in the dismissive sense) as the GP is the top comment (as of now). There's a difference between clickbait and trying to convey the gist of an article with limited chars (and thereby triggering the reader's bias).

The article makes it clear from the outset that:

1. She was in a very junior position and was cold calling clients before EoL-ing an embedded DB product

2. She delivered the insight to key executives in a way that prompted a product positioning pivot that turned out very lucrative (even if the $1B is disputed the circumstantial information seems to support it - parent company's valuation/revenue and the fact that the product still exists within a larger company).

3. Her track record speaks for itself (so it's not an anomaly) but this experience is also her origin story.

The expletive was tongue-in-cheek, in reference to the publication (How the F*ck). If that's missed then I can see how the post could seem like an angry rant. (It isn't.)

I think a energetic butterfly was more responsible for the $1 billion in revenue.

But on a serious note, this is clickbait. Anything that says "X happened, then ${big money}" is designed to trigger "X happened, if and only if ${big money}" in peoples minds, and therefore "X is the secret to ${big money}" so I need to find out that secret to big wealth, so I will read the article. It's bait.

Wow, at no point did I get the impression that she was responsible for the whole thing. Yeah, the title made me think she was going to be more responsible, but nothing wrong with pulling people in and I was very satisfied with her explanation and story.

And the story is awesome! It points to how sometimes getting the product into as many hands as possible and then interviewing customers on how they use it a great technique for eventual product success.

She probably could have talked about the engineering side a bit more, but she probably just wasn't in the loop there. And anyways, this is obviously a marketing blog post so engineering would have been a pointless diversion.

Btw, I got the sense she was enthusiastic and energetic and likely very diligent in her efforts to call up her customers and get to the root of how they used it.

Don't underestimate that level of ground floor contribution.

Is this sort of thing not pretty normal for basically all business writing? It's meant to get traffic inside echo chambers like LinkedIn, not actually help people.

This is a bit harsh. I'm sure a lot of readers must have got at least one takeaway from this article.

It's helpful to remember that what might be obvious to one person might be a revelation to another - depending on their skill and experience.

Perhaps, but it seems a lot of this is basically building public profiles to gain credibility (and build your network) to apply for c-level jobs, more than anything else.

The title pulled me in and I enjoyed the read without feeling misled. Mission accomplished.

April discloses that it was a huge team effort.

I helped conceive, and managed, a product that handled $1B revenue per month at a single customer site (and was installed at many more). You don't see me going around and bragging about it (oh wait...)

Funny enough, the significance went completely over my head at the time. We were too focused on making sure it worked and not losing any deposits. It wasn't until a year later when I ran some stats for a product review / presentation that it sank in.

yes, next article would be.... i bought a book on amazon and helped build it into a trillion dollar company.

"Marketing guy markets himself as a mover and shaker. News at 11."

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