> the vendor gleefully assured us that they were experienced with "migrations of this scale"
Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
Sales is mostly just lying to collect a commission check.
French poet Paul Valery once said: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned".
It is the same for those projects. You just gotta keep paying forever.
Overall the product isn't really needed, and sorta sucks too. If I was an typical developer trying to pitch a startup idea to businesses, it probably would have never got off the ground and nobody would have wasted any time. Maybe eventually the developer would have landed on an idea so good it had REAL PMF, and made that.
But no, instead I sold some garbage and now I'm stuck working on it. There is such a thing as being too good at sales. You don't want sales talking people into bad ideas.
Is there a world where you hire someone to build a more maintainable replacement?
Why not put those sales skills to work and sell the business to someone else?
Deep down I know the product isn't that well liked, and a lot of the renewals are based on my salesmanship. I know I have a chance at fixing the bugs, because I wrote everything, while someone else would be screwed IMO. It just wouldn't be fair to sell it to someone because I know they'd be making a mistake.
When people keep using software, it is because it solves a problem. They might not like the software but begrudgingly use it anyway because it solves that problem. So sure, pat yourself on the back for good salesmanship, but also realize that they keep using it because even if it is covered in warts, it still does the job.
It doesn't really solve a problem. Not really atleast. It's a little better than using 6 Excel sheets via a google drive honestly. The reason it got sold is because in theory it sounds a lot better than Google docs. But it's only a little better. And it has its own host of difficulties (can't modify anything for example.. don't even ask me to add a column or rearrange a table for you).
I know it's not great because if I get a company using it, but don't hand hold onboarding to an extreme level, they never even really get going with it.
When selling it, if I don't really lay it on thick and do a spectacular job, they don't buy.
The reason they don't quit once on it isn't that it solves a great problem or is much better than their previous solution (almost always just Excel sheets), but because switching back to their abandoned system is harder than the $300 a month is worth. So they just keep paying.
Also, I've contacted and pitched wayyy more than 34 companies. Many companies are/were smart enough to pass on it.
I'm not writing for a sob story or to talk up MY salesmanship for whatever reason, but I wanted to share my main takeaway from this project.
When doing lean startup and trying to get your first customers, don't think youve struck gold just because you had a great person schmooze a few people into using your MVP. It can be a false start just based on their persuasion. At this point I'd rather tone down salesmanship a lot and see if I can find a product that really strikes a cord with them instead. Less false starts that way IMO. I'd much rather have gotten 1-2 costumers only, not 34, and realized this isn't worth pursuing.
It sounds like bringing them and you together would basically be a guarantees success.
By the way; I am working as a self-employed developer and my favourite project is a software that has initially been written by a self-taught programmer who both started and ended his career with that software. As far as I heard (he was already out when I joined) he got burned out and said that he never wanted to work with anything software related again. He used PHP and jQuery. I've mainly added new stuff instead of touching the old code, while only only refactoring the old stuff where necessary in very small increments. Most other devs really hate to touch it, but I don't understand why. Of course it would be better to replace it with a new version that has been built on top of a proper framework, but their management is too stubborn to understand that an incremental approach is the better way of handling this. So instead, they try to get a "complete understanding" of the project and try to create a completely new version in a "big bang" approach. This usually takes a few months or even a year until this new replacement project is considered a failure while I keep maintaining and cleaning up the old project. It's been six years for now and even their most "optimistic" people currently say that the old software will be running for at least two more years. Having built up a lot of knowledge over that time, I could easily create a new version in less than half a year (I actually think two months, but I'm tripling my estimation for safety), but that would make their management look bad (long story), so I don't get the green light to do that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Two month sound too optimistic" you say? Well it's an inbox, an outbox and one form with a few calculations in between. I have created way more complex software than that in the last years.
Reality would be that a combo of a good developer and a good salesperson would get into a similar situation that I got myself into, but with a better more manageable code base. Not the worst outcome in the world, that's basically most b2b saas technically.
Long ago i made a few html websites for businesses then explained basic html and ftp to the owner. It was perfect except from other webdesign shops hammering my clients.
Depends on the type of sales. A pretty good indicator is how many times a customer makes a purchase from the same salesperson. If it's just one purchase (like ERP consulting) it could be grifty/etc like in this case. If they're buying from the same guy for years, there's often very different types of salespeople. I used to think all salespeople fit the sketchy used car salesman type, but after working with great salespeople I know better. This is a big blind spot for us techical/engineering types.
Estimation is hard but it seems it's far too easy for the vendor to blatantly lie with all the risk on the customer.