Ask YC: Is it a bad idea to...? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Is it a bad idea to...?

6 pointsmyoung818 comments

Is it a bad idea to build a product where the distribution model relies heavily on sales?

Here's the problem: our product fulfills a big need (not a want) for a certain group of individual consumers. However, they're not part of the TC50K and it won't be easy to get the word out to them. What we're thinking about doing instead is selling the product to HR departments in big companies (a few of our competitors are already doing this). There's a lot more money there, but the product doesn't fill as big a need anymore and selling to the enterprise seems a lot harder than selling to individual customers.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

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Hard to draw any specific conclusions, but the cost of a sales team can be fairly easily determined. A lot of that stuff is really more science than art, and there are some good resources to help guide you.

Plenty of companies have been successful with an app that is sold through a sales organization.

I've done some of the math before, and have run/developed tech sales organizations. Email me if you have more specific questions that you don't want to post publicly.

What's your email address? :)

It's in my profile. I try not to post it out in the open too much to minimize bot harvesting.

Nobody but news.yc admins can see the email you enter in the 'email:' textbox in your profile. You need to put it in the 'about:' box too.

By far the most annoying "feature" on this site. There needs to be a simple checkbox next to the email field where you decide whether or not to make it public in an spam proof way, like an image or two random characters instead of the . and @.

d'oh, thanks!

Updated...

Most startups i read of here, try succeeding in getting famous with a service known by millions of people. But, the market for startups trying to pitch products to well-established companies is not only big, it's also quite worth the effort, compared to direct-marketing. In most of the cases, startups don't have financial resources to reach out for residential customers, no matter how interesting your product might be (ok, you still might dream about succeeding like $youtube, $facebook, $whatever, but reality is you need some revenue to pay your rent, regardless what enthusiasts tell you.. and they won't pay your rent, unless they sign some investment thing - at least, here in Europe we tend to think like that).

However: large corporates often either lack innovation, or they try to lower costs by implementing something which is open-source. There is your chance. Go implement something based on open-source which is competitive to some commercial product, and you'll see you can sell for 1/5 of the price of big vendors.... and a lot of companies are really sick of being dependend of big corporates like Cisco, Nortel, whatever... you "just have to get your foot into the door" of such companies... and for this task, you have to have a great sales person.... you don't make it as a technical kind of person... I tried it... forget it... it's a completely different world... the important thing is: respect it... these sales-guys sell your late grand-mother, but they keep you going... No-one on the street will ever recognise you, and no-one on the street will have heard of your company, but does that really matter if you deliver to a big corporate which pays you some ten thousands of dollards a month to satisfy THEIR customers? Think about it, before wasting just another 10 men months to something RESIDENTIAL customers might like.

The biggest challenge here is getting ideas in this space, since most of us are at small companies (all software companies are small in the big picture). If you are someone working in the IT department of a large company, you have an advantage. A huge one if fact - you are probably the target market of your product. The question remains - should someone go work for a large company for the sole purpose of generating ideas?

Programmers are maybe a little sheltered, but there are these people called "salesmen" who are sometimes quite good at dealing with the problems you'll have. If you genuinely fill a "big need", then it's just a matter of hiring the right person.

I'd say there's nothing wrong with this. I work for a small company that solicits specifically to one specific kind of organization. Our entire business model is based on targeting and sales, not open registration or enterprise solutions. The company was started around 2000, so it's worked well for almost 7 years now.

I'd rather have a sales team than sell to enterprises. Selling to enterprises (which I do a bit in my current job) is so painful that I'd definitely recommend staying away from it. Sell it to the individuals in those enterprises and maybe one day it'll be worth the hassle of selling to the whole enterprise.

I've done some enterprise sales as well, and I think it depends a lot on what you're selling vs. what they're buying.

If you have the right product, the enterprise sale is a rigorous, but also fun and rewarding process. If you have the wrong product (as in the case of my last company), the enterprise sales process is like trying to push a boulder uphill against a headwind on a mountain made of teflon.

Each to their own, I guess I'm a hacker who's not keen on doing sales. Enterprise sales seems to be an ugly dance of feature comparisons and bs, which I hate.

I think yours is a common feeling among true hackers. Sales is less of a "binary" thing, there are too many other grey areas that get in the way of making it a process that can be solved with pure "math".

You could say that I am more of a social-engineering hacker than a software hacker. Although, I know more than a fair bit of perl, C++, SQL, linux, etc. I've written my own apps and various bits of glue logic as part of getting a sale done, because I could, and because it was the most efficient use of resources.

But sales-hacking is (IMO) sort of a language or process unto itself. It can be fun and challenging and rewarding (when it's not utterly aggravating :) )

i think you would have more luck if you were more specific in your question about your product and your customers.

What's your funding situation? Do you know anyone in an HR department at any decently sized company that might be willing to try it out and provide references to future potential clients?

I've talked to the Director of HR at GM before--wouldn't say that I "know" her, though.

I emailed her about this, but she hasn't gotten back to us yet. I've just started trying to get in touch with some other HR directors that are local (e.g. WSGR) to get their thoughts.

we're putting finishing touches to "our product" (outside the US and for enterprise clients) and in the next week the sales would begin...and we're just facing the reality of selling to enterprises.. its a really ardous task... at this point.. we're thinkin of bringing in more people (either as co founders, or as partners). shoot me an email if you would be interested

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