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Comment by yyyfb | Hacker News Reader

> Your biggest pain point is most likely that you know your business very well, but you probably do not know enough about the business context of your partners.

I'm not in the market, but FYI, the tone of your post wouldn't make me want to buy your stuff. You sound too eager to lecture your customers instead of being eager to learn from them.

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I didn't get that from the tone. I inferred this person was trying to convey the perceived importance of some critical things and gave good examples with clear knowledge of the problem domain in a limited space. IOW, I thought it was very well articulated and helpful, FWIW.

It's fine to convey the importance of these things. It's another thing to do it with an implied assumption that OP doesn't know better themselves, which context doesn't really give a lot of clues about. Obviously in the end it's a personal thing anyways.

Sometimes when you really do have something less noticeable to offer, you have to toot your own horn a bit.

Not everyone is going to like the sound of it no matter how well-played.

Fair enough. To clarify, my point was not necessarily “I know better”, but that it is incredibly difficult to get a broad view of the market from a single perspective. This market is by definition a chain of steps with parties that may be antagonistic. It is atypical in that way, and writing software in-house may be more difficult in this sector than in others because of it.

While writing software in-house gives you software better tailored to your exact situation it is at the cost of losing the overview of the business and the perspective of the parties you interact with. Whether that trade-off is worth it I’m probably pretty biased on, so take my stance with a grain of salt, but imo the business is intrinsically relatively ill suited for in-house dev considering the high degree of collab with other parties.

Apologies if it came off as arrogance, that was not what I was going for.

> Apologies if it came off as arrogance, that was not what I was going for.

No need to apologize, just wanted to make you aware of how it came off to me.

> my point was not necessarily “I know better”, but that it is incredibly difficult to get a broad view of the market from a single perspective. This market is by definition a chain of steps with parties that may be antagonistic. It is atypical in that way

Maybe? That description sounds like it could probably be applied to any highly fragmented vertical though...

> imo the business is intrinsically relatively ill suited for in-house dev considering the high degree of collab with other parties.

I think this hits a reasonable point — if most of the development is related to internal operations, it could be a different calculus than if it is mostly related to interchange with other parties, which implies knowing enough about their business to make sense to them.

Then again, if all you have to interchange with other parties is a choice of third-rate bottom-of-the-barrel software providers anyways, I think it can still be reasonable to switch to in-house dev.

I think he’s toeing the line of “listen build it yourself but you’re missing a decade of expertise I can add to your stack tomorrow”

That said, my feeling is the guy doesn’t have a prebuilt fit for his company / he’s already shopped extensively.

A counterpoint: I didn’t detect that from the post you’re replying to at all.

> You sound too eager to lecture your customers instead of being eager to learn from them.

One does not necessarily exclude the other, in my experience. Personally I love being told when I’m wrong, and I think the OP was actually fishing for this kind of feedback.

My cheesy tagline for this is “The customer is always right about their problems, rarely about the solution to it”. They know their business inside and out, and I’m not about to tell them otherwise. Metaphorically: if they need to cross a river, that doesn’t make them bridge engineers. But boy will they tell me if the bridge is in the wrong place.

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