Traffic spikes are bad for your product

This can be very distracting if you’re pursuing it intentionally and treating ‘going viral’ as a prerequisite to success.

This is so asinine. This would be like Target locking you in until you make a purchase, because you entered the store, and are thus wasting their resources. You owe them for being bathed in their fluorescent lights and breathing their climate controlled air, I guess.

I swear: sales people must exist in their own bubble. Don't they know that Solutions hates them because Sales sets them up to fail? Don't they know that their customers hate them because the customer knows Sales will lie to get their commission? Don't they know Engineering hates them because they sell things that are impossible, on timelines that nobody can meet, in order to enrich only themselves?

If Sales has a chip on their shoulder about anything they can get fucking bent

It's less this, and more that some customers have no business buying certain products, and the sooner you can filter them out of your sales funnel, the happier everyone will be a year from now.

Let's say you sell specialized enterprise SaaS that normally gets integrated at the API level. This means:

- Lots of potential customers are too small to benefit from the product, or they don't understand what problem the product is actually solving.

- Closing a sale probably involves lawyers and custom contracts, which costs $$$.

- Customers need to either know how to use an API, or they need to have budget to pay the SaaS provider to write integration code.

- Once the sale is closed, there's likely to be labor-intensive onboarding process.

- You don't actually want customers who are going to try it for a year, hate it, and bail. You want people who love it and who will renew every year, or who will buy more without another sales process.

So sales people are trained to think about these issues, and to prioritize leads who have relevant problems, a good baseline understanding of what the product does, and enough budget to be able to properly set up and use the product.

If you're selling something low end, like a hotdog or pair of shoes, this makes sense. But for higher-end purchases there is a relationship component which can take time to build.

I've encountered salespeople who get pissed off they've "wasted" time with me and it stood out as kind of a low-class, graceless, bottom-line only approach to the job and life in general. Sales can actually be pretty cool, but not with such a poor attitude!

That's quite the claim and a bit misleading. Successful businesses have been firing customers forever. I think they intend on insulting users they want to fire.

I don't fully disagree with you, but I don't think it's correct to suggest you can't be successful with the attitude expressed in that article.

My approach with my clients: if they don't understand or misunderstand something then I failed to explain things to them clearly. Not a big deal, I correct it so we're on the same page and move on. It's a great opportunity for both of us to learn and grow.

(Yes, I'm aware he worked at Uber, but he never was responsible for turning it into a zero-awareness brand to a household brand. Not taking any credit away from that tho, and I actually agree with a lot of his content.)

I made this mistake multiple times back in early 2010s "virality hacking" days, and man it was a painful and costly learning experience.

It is being honest about your opportunities / visitors during the spike.

Loitering spends up resources used by other paying customers. Moreover, if you go into a brick-and-mortar store intending to make a purchase but the store is full of people walking around, talking, and not really purchasing anything, then all of those people are getting in the way. At best they're slowing down your paying customers who have to navigate around them. They're probably also antagonizing your paying customers with conversations about nothingburgers instead of conversations about the products. It's also extremely possible that they're causing fire/emergency hazards (eg, too many people, too constricted space).

> It seems like castigating your potential customers because they didn't give you money immediately or give you as much money as you wanted is a shitty business practice.

I completely agree. In the age of "everything online is free", it's especially shitty to demand people to pay up without giving them opportunity to view and exercise the product.

If your online site or store gets a spike in traffic, the other customers shouldn’t be impacted (assuming you didn’t do something like self-hosting on an under provisioned server). The people can come and go without buying anything and not block any potential sales.

However, all traffic drives more exposure. They may not buy something today, but they may remember it and mention it to a friend next week or a family remember at the next holiday gathering. The cost of traffic is nearly zero in this era, so any exposure that has a non-zero chance of spreading your brand name is good.

You could make a truly great product far too early and nobody would use it and you would get bankrupt. Then someone else would come with something, perhaps even worse, at the right time and cash out.

The edge-hangers have two good choices: They can be very visibly present and then join the conversation when an opportunity presents itself, or they can leave.

Social-media edge-hangers don't have to do anything, they can just hang there forever without clearly joining or leaving the group.

I am not a native English speaker, so may be wrong, but as I understand the word, a looky-loo is derogatory for someone with no real intention to buy.

If users do not “realize the app has nothing for them” (your words) before trying the app, by this definition they are NOT looky-loos and you’re unfairly deriding them by calling them that :)

In my humble opinion. No judging and no big deal, just a bit too harsh for my tastes.