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Comment by falloutx | Hacker News Reader

Sales is amazing but if your companies sales people require engineering to build POCs a lot of the times or always have to sell some custom solutions, then it wastes a lot of resources and it usually indicates the company is losing product market fit.

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That is true. My current work is in bespoke environments with mainly non-technical buyers who have been burned in the past. Our POCs are pretty minor lifts to build credibility and have worked extremely well.

If you're working in SaaS or commodity products and have to run POCs a lot, you're totally correct.

Your company is selling the 'valet service' more than the products.

There are people willing to pay for convenience AND security at the same time (hire someone else to manage the problem, and they're the 'key').

I'm wondering about that. I think with the advent of AI, we might see a new kind of successful software company - one that doesn't sell a single solution to many customers, but instead has the building blocks, prompts (agents skills etc) & processes to quickly build very custom solutions for each customer - using a new blend of engineers that are not exactly "customer support" nor traditional "sw eng", but more around the emerging "forward-deployed engineer" role.

Sometimes, but if your product is a platform (or anything beyond a niche solution in a broader problem domain) then you're going to spend some time showing people how to make it work best for them.

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