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Comment by sfjailbird | Hacker News Reader

There's gotta be a name for this fallacy. "This enterprise software sucks and is extremely expensive, so we will build something that is actually good and become billionaires!"

This is the graveyard of engineer driven startups in the enterprise space, who make the mistake of thinking that software quality matters. The fact is it is not a top priority, if it is even a priority at all.

In the enterprise space, if you're not a Fortune 500 company, all that matters is 'relationships', by which I mean sleazy sales processes (or actual nepotistic friends-and-family relationships).

Joel Spolsky wrote a great essay once about why there is no software priced between $1000 and $100,000. Because above $1000 you need a sales team that takes purchasing managers to strip clubs and play golf with CEOs, and that shit adds up. On the plus side, your software can be dogshit, like the stuff you work with every day.

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Exactly.

Only engineer and product oriented types think that quality has any actual value. Unfortunately it does not, even less so if your only USP is "quality". If your products only differentiator is that it's technically better than the competitor it really needs to be 100x better in order to sway anyone's interest.

If your maximum work/effort you can put into any project is 100% which you have to allocate into fragments, the product person will put 80% into product development and 20% to marketing but a sales person will put 80% into marketing and 20% into development and unfortunately the latter will product much better results. All it needs to be is "good enough" but reaching to your target market with the right product really is the key.

The unfortunate side effect is that quality is best achieved by having the PR team write it out and put it into a snappy slogan on your product website. Done. Quality achieved.

Edit: And the above applies to your typical non-safety critical Saas, Enterprise, B2B, B2C software. And thinking back to for example the Boeing crashes it likely also applies to the the "safety critical" software/systems as well...

Isn't that going into the other extreme though?

You can get very far with just sales and marketing, but if the quality isn't there, reputationally, that's going to catch up with you over time, same if you have dodgy business practices (i.e.: predatory pricing practices for existing customers, impossible cancellations etc.).

> there is no software priced between $1000 and $100,000

Nitpick, but this is the price range for most professional film restoration software.

The target is often small restoration houses with workstations at 10 or so seats.

The world has changed. Today you can sell software for $5000 or $10000 without any sales process. Not always of course, you have to find the right niche.

Curious to learn more about this, re pricing limits in today's corporate world.

What do most managers have access to on their corp card in terms of spend limits, without needing to get VP/finance approval for their purchase?

In my mind, I had the limit as $500/month (potentially from some old readings on the subject).

There is a whole non-corporate world of SMBs that employ 30 or 100 people total. Those businesses have no VPs or corporate cards, but they still have problems and are willing to pay good money for solutions. Family businesses in any industry, law offices, marketing agencies, boutique hedge funds/pe, etc.

Corporate approval for a 10k purchase doesn't need to be complicated either. As a software vendor it helps to have a web page/email with all the relevant info intended to be forwarded to accounts payable.

Hat tip on the Spolsky post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...

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