Startups: You Should Value Software More

wadefoster.net

22 points·smalter··5 comments

HA! If you make pricing decisions for one of these companies please ignore the next paragraph!

This is one of the reasons enterprises will pay good money for software (even bad software) - because 30,000 users saving 5 minutes per month (1 hr per year) @ $20 an hour is still $600,000 savings per year.

Save them 1 hour per month = $7,200,000 Save them 1 hour per day = $30,000,000

Though this depends on what kind of time is saved. If I go from thinking while shuffling papers to thinking while sitting at my desk, my company isn't saving money.

This obviously isn't to say that I want to spend more time shuffling papers, and of course having to deal with a task means a context switch (which can sometimes be more expensive than the task itself), my point is simply that the analysis needs to run a bit deeper than "how much time is this saving?"

100% agree, but on repetitive tasks that can be automated it can mean massive time savings.

Think scanning a pallet with 1,000 units via RFID vs manually (just an example I realize there is hardware & software in the example).

For sure. I didn't mean to imply that there weren't cases where automation is a big win.

If I had $10 for ever hour I'd saved, I'd have $1000 every day. In reality, though, "saving an hour" on one task just leads to "getting stuck for an hour" on another task.

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