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Comment by dannyobrien | Hacker News Reader

The odd thing about all of this (well, I guess it's not odd, just ironic), is that when Google AdWords started, one of the notable things about it was that anyone could start serving or buying ads. You just needed a credit-card. I think that bought Google a lot of credibility (along with the ads being text-only) as they entered an already disreputable space: ordinary users and small businesses felt they were getting the same treatment as more faceless, distant big businesses.

I have a friend that says Google's decline came when they bought DoubleClick in 2008 and suffered a reverse-takeover: their customers shifted from being Internet users and became other, matchingly-sized corporations.

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I have had way too many arguments over the years with product and sales people at my job on the importance of instant self-signup. I want to be able to just pay and go, without having to talk to people or wait for things.

I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer, but I am never going to sign up for anything that makes me talk to someone before I can buy.

> I know part of it is that sales wants to be able to price discriminate and wants to be able to use their sales skills on a customer

You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.

> You say that as if it isn’t the entire reason why these interactions should be avoided at all costs. Dynamic pricing should be a crime.

Does segmentation also count as dynamic pricing?

    The IT guy at Podunk Lutheran College has no money: Gratis.
    The IT guy at a medium-sized real estate agency has some money: $500.
    The IT guy at a Fortune 100 company has tons of money: $50,000.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/oh-you-wanted-awesome-edition/

The entire lab supply industry is disgusting in this respect. The funding (and recent grants) that a given professor or research lab has is generally publicly available information that vendors will buy in easily digestible formats from brokers and companies that scrape the websites of major granting agencies.

All of their products, however realistically commoditized, will require a drawn out engagement with a rep who knows how much money you’ve received recently and even has an outline what research you plan to do over the next few years since even the detailed applications often get published alongside funding allocations.

The exact same piece of equipment, consumables required to use it, and service agreements might be anywhere from X to 10X depending on what they (as a result of asymmetrically available knowledge) know you need and how much you could theoretically spend.

A group of research universities should start a non-profit co-op to produce this for them.

Getting just the university of California should be enough critical mass.

Depends on the product. Some products just have a single supplier for the whole world over, because they are extremely specialized.

It's not uncommon though for eg departments to have common equipment that they negotiate together.

Not parent poster, but I think a more practical approach is to ban secret discriminatory pricing.

If everybody can see the prices that would be quoted in other circumstances, that exerts a strong moderating force against abuse.

It won't help you if there's a monopoly, but I consider that a separate problem needing separate solutions.

While I can certainly think of ways in which ordinary segmentation can be stretched beyond the limits of what’s reasonable, the example you give is categorically different.

In your example, you’re paying extra for additional capabilities. Doesn’t really matter if it’s a nonlinear increase in cost with the number of seats. Two companies buy 500 seats and pay the same price.

What I object to is some sales bro deciding I should pay 5x more for those same licenses because of who I am, what I look like, where I’m from, etc. It’s absolutely repulsive. Why can’t you simply provide a fair service at a fair price and stop playing these fuck-fuck games? You’re making a profit on this sale either way. Stop trying to steal my profit margin.

Instead of trying to scam me by abusing information asymmetry, why not use your sales talents to upsell me on additional or custom services, once you’ve demonstrated value? Honest and reliable vendors generally get continued (and increasing) business.

Conversely, these Broadcom/private-equity/mafia tactics generally have me running for the exits ASAP. Spite is one hell of a motivator.

Pricing tiers are a form of dynamic pricing. Service free tiers basically couldn't exist without dynamic pricing, as they are subsidized by the paying tiers.

Certain purchases (like health insurance in my country) should be a conversation, because the options are fiendishly complex and the attributes people typically use for comparison are wrong. The consequences are lifelong.

But not a conversation to a sales rep who will just push whatever gives them the largest commission.

I thought thees things were complex on purpose to make it hard for people to easily understand and compare so you have to speak to a sales person who can do the upselling

Nope. I built a calculator for that last year and ooooh boy. Now I pipe half the requests to a human because of all the possible mistakes a person can make. It's crazy complicated.

Finding that human is also hard because of the perverse incentives to sell more lucrative products.

That's my point, you need to be a specialist to understand it, but the specialists are incentivised to upsell you.

A simpler product would be better for consumers, but won't happen because there are industries (and a lot of lobbying) built up around keeping the money train rolling.

Not really. Some things are just complex.

Every time I go to a presentation about the health care options I have, it ends up just being the representative reading off a slide with the actual information. All the information I need is in print. I have never received a single piece of valuable information that wasn’t easier to get just reading the docs myself.

We might live in a different country and serve a different demographic.

My guy saved a lot of people from making dumb mistakes. Then again he's good at his job, and if he was not I would wipe his business. Aligning incentives was very important for me. Most brokers are just bad.

You are also a developer though, and developers are notorious for wanting self serve.

Someone who works in finance or conpliances might want a demo, or views those things as signals the product is for serious use cases.

Sure, and they should have that option. But in my experience business-folks ask techies to evaluate services all the time, and ideally we can just start out in the low-/no-touch tier to feel things out. If that tier isn't available, us techs might just try a different service.

The kind of products hidden behind sales calls are generally the sort where the opinion of IC-level tech staff is next to irrelevant. With these kinds of products, the purchase decision is being made at a group level, the contract sizes are large, and budgetary approvals are required. It’s a snowball the size of a house, and it started rolling down the mountain months (or years) before it got to your desk. Literally nobody cares if you buy a single license or not, and if you (personally) refuse to try it because it doesn’t have self-service, you’ll be ignored for being the bad stereotype of an “engineer”, or worse.

About the only time you’ll be asked to evaluate such a product as an IC is when someone wants an opinion about API support or something equivalent. And if you refuse to do it, the decision-makers will just find the next guy down the hall who won’t be so cranky.

I think this is true at larger organizations, but even a “small/medium” startup can easily sign contracts for single services for $100k+, and in my experience, salespeople really do care about commissions at those price points. A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software. Github and Slack are good examples of services who make very good use of their ability to self-serve their customers out of the gate, in spite of also supporting very large orgs.

In these conversations, I never ever see the buyers justifying or requesting a sales process involving people and meetings and opaque pricing.

It’s true that complicated software needs more talking, but there is a LOT of software that could be bought without a meeting. The sales department won’t stand for it though.

> A lot of software gets a foothold in an org by starting with the ICs, and individuals, not groups, are often the ones that request or approve software.

Not really. Even if we keep the conversation in the realm of startups (which are not representative of anything other than chaos), ICs have essentially no ability to take unilateral financial risk. The Github “direct to developer” sales model worked for Github at that place and time, but even they make most of their money on custom contracts now.

You’re basically picking the (very) few services that are most likely to be acquired directly by end users. Slack is like an org-wide bike-shedding exercise, and Github is a developer tool. But once the org gets big enough, the contracts are all mediated by sales.

Outside of these few examples, SaaS software is almost universally sold to non-technical business leaders. Engineers have this weird, massive blind spot for the importance of sales, even if their own paycheck depends on it.

This is really not true in my experience. In fact, all my experience has been with products that aren’t THAT expensive, and the individual dev teams do decide. These are SaaS products, and sometimes the total cost is under $1000 a year, and I still can’t get prices without contacting sales.

Also, it isn’t just ICs. I have worked as a senior director, with a few dozen people reporting into me… and I still never want to talk to a sales person on the phone about a product. I want to be able to read the docs, try it out myself, maybe sign up for a small plan. Look, if you want to put the extras (support contracts, bulk discounts, contracting help, etc) behind a sales call, fine. But I need to be able to use your product at a basic level before I would ever do a sales call.

The number one rule of business that should just be passively reiterated to everyone working in any type of transactional field:

1. Never make it hard for people to give you money.

Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.

Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with tech...c'mon guys, get on it

Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.

The crappy apps that replaced parking meters are the people who disrupted the existing market with tech

There's also the unfortunate stick of a much larger parking ticket that is even more trouble to contest.

(Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway.

There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.

LOL. All the city parking spots around here are managed by PayByPhone, and pretty much all private parking spots are DiamondParking paid through ParkMobile.

I raised the issue with my local city council rep. She didn't care.

You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Parking_Meters

This doesn't apply to private pay lots though, so there's still some amount of "choice".

Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made. Some administration could sign away the whole country on their last day.

It's straight up corruption, pure and simple. The UK is also full of this crap. The officials and executives who've facilitated and profited from this robbery should be jailed.

So, the officials that signed that deal went to jail, right?

I don’t think a monopoly requires literally every possible option to be controlled by the monopolistic entity.

Also, I only have time for so many hills on which to die. I’m not sure parking reform, while worthy, makes the cut.

They get paid more if you get a parking ticket.

The RyanAir model of technically legal, but actively playing a zero-sum game against their consumers' diligence.

i'm currently disputing a bill with a parking company. there's a kiosk at the movie theater served by the parking lot, so that you can get free parking if you see a movie. the kiosk has an option for you to describe your car if you forgot your license plate number. i did that and they sent me a bill for unpaid parking.

customer service is unable to acknowledge why that feature is offered and can only assert that if you park you gotta pay. after threatening to complain to the BBB and my state AG they have graciously offered to drop the ticket to $25.

thank you for listening to me vent :)

Huh, where I live you often can use many different parking apps, and the one i tried is very simple and user friendly.

Start app, wait for gps, turn time wheel, press start.

Turn time wheel? How do you know in advance how long you stay? Where I live, you start and when you leave, you click stop. You also get reminders in case you forgot to stop.

Not GP, but I guess I'm using the same app. You guess (and then it gives you the price up front). 10 minutes before it expires it asks you if you want to extend it. There might also have been a detect if you drive away and stop feature (don't recall).

Mostly these days all paid parking has registration camera's, and it just starts and stops parking for you automatically. However, there are like 3 or so apps that compete here so you need a profile with all of them for this to work and you also need to enable this on all the apps.

There is no way this is not a degradation compared to a physical meter accepting cash plus whatever. My country doesn't really have parking apps yet here and paying for parking is never a friction.

> There is no way this is not a degradation compared to a physical meter accepting cash plus whatever.

Well you can extend the parking time while not at your car. That is a big plus.

Or just pay whetever's due when you return to exit. Having to schedule and reschedule sounds unnecessary to begin with.

You can only do that at a dedicated and fenced of garage or parking lot. You can't do that at the curb in the inner city. You have to pay upfront.

Without the app you have to find the meter, pay, print the receipt and get back to your car to put in in the window. Remember the time and get back.

With the app you can just start walking towards your destination while you start the metering.

At least in my country they face no competition. For a given location, only one app will work.

It depends on the environment.

If a platform is designed in a way that users can sign up and go, it can work well.

If an application is complicated or it’s a tool that the whole business runs on, often times the company will discover their customers have more success with training and a point of contact/account manager to help with onboarding.

You're not the target customer.

Instant self signup died with cryptocurrency and now AI: any "free" source of compute/storage/resources will be immediately abused until you put massive gates on account creation.

Who said anything about free? OP wanted to pay Google $100.

OP wanted "instant self signup". That doesn't work when malicious actors are trying to register accounts with stolen credentials. The verification flow is required because of the amount of pressure from malicious actors against both free and newly-created accounts.

"Give access now, cancel if validation fails" doesn't work either - so long as attackers can extract more than 0 value in that duration they'll flood you with bad accounts.

Well, then give me self-signup with a clearly outlined verification flow that I can follow from A to Z.

If you give me a form where I can upload my passport or enter a random number from a charge on my card, that counts as "instant" enough. On the other hand, if you really need to make me wait several days while you manually review my info, fine, just tell me upfront so I can stop wasting my time. And be consistent in your UI as to whether I'm verified yet. It's all about managing expectations.

Besides, Amazon hands out reasonable quotas to newly created accounts without much hassle, and they seem to be doing okay. I won't believe for a second that trillion-dollar companies like Google don't know how to keep abuse at a manageable level without making people run in circles.

> sales people

> talk to people

There will clearly be a gap in understanding, when their whole job is to talk to people, and you come to them to argue for clients to not do that.

As you point out it's not that black and white, most companies will have tiers of client they want to spend less or more time with etc. but sales wanting direct contact with clients is I think a fundamental bit.

> sales wanting direct contact with clients

But what do the clients want? Your business should not be structured to make sales people happy.

That's just a disqualification process. Many products don't want a <$40k/annual customer because they're a net drain. For those, "talk to sales" is a way to qualify whether you're worth it as a customer. Very common in B2B and makes sense. Depends entirely on the product, of course.

My previous company was like this, and it boggles the mind.

Sales is so focused on their experience that they completely discount what the customer wants. Senior management wants what's best for sales & the bottom line, so they go along with it. Meanwhile, as a prospective customer I would never spend a minute evaluating our product if it means having to call sales to get a demo & a price quote.

My team was focused on an effort to implement self-service onboarding -- that is, allowing users to demo our SaaS product (with various limitations in place) & buy it (if so desired) without the involvement in sales. We made a lot of progress in the year that I was there, but ultimately our team got shutdown & the company was ready to revert back to sales-led onboarding. Last I heard, the CEO "left" & 25% of the company was laid off; teams had been "pivoting" every which way in the year since I'd been let go, as senior management tried to figure out what might help them get more traction in their market.

My current employer offers three tiers of licensing with clearly articulated prices & benefits (the lowest of which is free), but also offers a "Custom - let's talk" option because the reality is that sometimes customer situations are complicated and bespoke contracts make sense, but at least the published pricing provides directional guidance heading into a discussion. I think this is reasonable.

> use their sales skills

Boy oh boy are they going to be surprised when they learn what AI can replace.

If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and go is self preservation.

For enterprise deals.

Bless you and your family for all time and beyond. Having to talk to someone before I even get a price to compare, or a demo, drives me mad, and then a week later you get their contract and find they claim ownership of everything your company uploads to them -- all that time down the drain, and the salesperson never read the contract so they don't know what to say. Then there are the smaller companies with unwritten policies -- we used to get call metric software from a small Swiss outfit, but I discovered we were billed based on how many employees we've ever had, not based on current employees, with no method to delete terminated employees from the database -- on what planet do you expect someone to pay a recurring expense in perpetuity for someone who showed up for training one day 5 years ago and was never heard from again? I was so mad when they gave us the renewal price, we made our own replacement software for it.

Anyway, long story short: I now require the price and details before I'll even consider talking to a salesperson, not the other way around. Might actually be a good job for an AI agent; they can talk to these sales bozos (respectfully) for me.

That has definitely changed. Google AdWords today is one of the most unfriendly services to onboard I've ever encountered. Signing up is trivial, setting up your first ad is easy, then you instantly get banned. Appeals do nothing. You essentially have to hire a professional just to use it.

My attempts always had validation issues that stopped the ads from running but I never figured it out and stopped trying

Also adding onto this, it is impossible to get human support!

One of my co-workers left with an active account and active card but no passwords noted. The company gave up and just had to cancel + create a new account for the next adwords specialist.

Yet it's still absolutely inundated with scams and occasionally links that directly download malware[1] that they don't action reports on. I don't think the process needs to be easier if they already can't keep up with moderation.

[1]: https://adstransparency.google.com/advertiser/AR129387695568...

It might seem vindictive, but these are the ads that google shows people who block all of Googles tracking or are new/blank profiles. Hear me out...

When Google has a bad/empty profile of you, advertisers don't bid on you, so it goes to the bottom feeders. Average (typically tech illiterate) people wandering through the internet mostly get ads for Tide, Chevy, and [big brand], because they pay Google much more for those well profiled users. These scam advertisers really don't pay much, but are willing to be shown to mostly anyone. They are a bit like the advertiser of last resort.

All of that is to say, if you are getting malware/scam ads from Google, it's probably because (ironically) you know what you are doing.

The thing to understand about google services is that they see so much spam and abuse that it's easier for them to just assume you are a spammer rather than a legitimate customer, unless you go through other channels to establish yourself.

I sell managed Google Ads services and have never had issues with my clients being banned. Google Ads sucks for 1000 other reasons.

Hi, as the original-thought-haver here (and a buyer of DoubleClick's services on various projects 1998-2003), I should clarify -the problem with Google's acquisition of DoubleClick wasn't just about customer scale, or even market power, it was that DoubleClick was already the skeeziest player on the internet, screwing over customers, advertisers and platforms at every opportunity, and culturally antithetical to Google at the time. And there wasn't any way that "Don't Be Evil" was going to win in the long run.

Look how quaint this seems now: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/consumer-gro...

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