Look like the brand you want to be
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Your brand should be something your customers expect, but only just.
Smart Bear was a small, upstart company, selling cutting-edge tools for developers into a relatively new market.
Developers and their managers value directness, especially at small companies. A vendor that shows all the signs of being a peacock while obviously being a pigeon will come across as scummy, because your market is expecting one of "small upstart dude in shed" or "massive enterprise company with a headcount greater than many cities", and not something in the middle.
Iron Port's customers, on the other hand, are buying security products, and frankly, the security industry is almost all theatre. An impressive-looking website, bespoke-looking product, and glossy sales brochure is all in the ante of playing at the security-vendor table, especially before Web 2.0.
Your company has to dress for the occasion.
Of course, the post doesn't go into details about the company's early days. But still, saying "here's what I should have done" sounds like pure speculation.
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.
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.
If you've already got a few customers and are trying to spur the engine of growth then going this way will surely help you.
Carefully make the correct decisions based on who your customers are (and in this facet if they really are Enterprise).
My experience with Enterprise is that it can seem like a networking game. Either your intro'd somehow, reached out to (the easy way), or part of a 'approved vendors' list (take a guess on how you get in to that... '*sometimes' requires insured...).
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2700-the-best-visual-descript...
Just keep in mind where you stand to make a better choice.
I wonder which was more of a win, doing the great documentation or making the equipment not look cheap. I'm betting it would depend greatly on who makes the purchase decisions in the customer companies.
On a device like this the life-cycle support is just as important as the initial sale. By creating great documentation, a safe package for the delivery, and caring enough to make it not look like a repackaged Dell system, it's a good indication that you'll care enough when I call at 3AM with an urgent issue.