Comment by cosmie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cosmie | Hacker News Reader

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> Edit: As to why they're valued at $35B, consider that their customer base is "Every company with IT too screwed up / incompetent to deliver new features in a timely manner."

And that's not even the totality of their potential customer base. It just happens to be their primary focus (and pricing model) right now.

There are a huge number of repetitive processes/workflows that simply don't bubble up to the purview of IT. They either don't directly intersect the systems centrally managed by IT, don't warrant the cost/time/effort required for IT to get involved, aren't formally documented or known by IT in the first place, or IT simply doesn't provide any official channels to engage with them for automation-related support.

UIPath's current market positioning and pricing scheme is geared solidly at business cases built off of "ROI of RPA vs. IT modernization efforts". With a focus on automating singular processes occurring at a high frequency. Which alone is enough to support their valuation. But they could also trivially expand their positioning to include "power user" oriented pricing plans and move into that area of the market as well, where singular users (or teams) have a high quantity of low volume workflows.

I talked with them a bit about it at various times. To me, their core value proposition should be "make IT's life easier."

An adversarial relationship with every company's IT department is a rocky road.

When with minimal product pivoting, they can be the savior of IT. Don't bill yourself as "replace IT," do so as "rapid prototyping."

What's the biggest pain in the ass about internal product development? Getting users to explain what they do and tell you what they want built.

By giving them the ability to self-execute, you invert that. "Mock up what you want in UiPath. Run it for 6 months to a year to tweak it how you want it. Then come to us and have it implemented properly."

Cleaner, more accurate specs (because they come from actual production); business does value discovery on their own; IT doesn't have to deal with hotball "this needs to be built in the next 14 days" demands trashing their strategic timelines.

You might as well ask them to come to you with 6-months perfect Excel sheets for reimplementation.

By the time they get there, they’re 98% not interested in switching from something working and they understand/control into something that won’t work for a while, will likely have some bugs, and won’t be in their control at all if they want changes.

These are all truths. But!

The business also doesn't understand source control, separation of duties, lifecycle promotion, release processes, or technical debt. (Literally, because it was partly my job to teach this again and again)

So eventually the audit firms are going to clue up and start hitting people with notes for over-reliance on prototype RPA systems in prod without change control. As they should.

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