No one gets fired for hiring IBM - how our pitch was stolen from us | Hacker News Reader

No one gets fired for hiring IBM - how our pitch was stolen from us

solidstategroup.com

106 pointsdabeeeenster43 comments

It happens - indeed it happened to me a few years back. I was part of a business that was asked to pitch a system specification to solve a particular business problem. We worked hard on the spec and felt sure we had covered all the bases - well we must have done because the business we pitched handed the whole thing over to their "preferred supplier" and asked them to build it - just as we specified it.

Lessons were learned. No more free consultancy. We got much more cautious about pitching to new prospective customers and made sure that any specifications were high level and trod carefully around key technical issues.

Thanks for the comment. These are exactly the learnings I am attempting to get across by writing this article.

The thing to do in the pitch is to demonstrate that you understand the problem space thoroughly, i.e. rather than pitching the solution, pitch yourselves as the best people to discover and implement the solution.

I too have worked at a company that learnt this the hard way.

Pitch for free, spec for pay. Doing business analysis is delivering significant value to the client, and you can sell that in particular. You are delivering a spec that's implementable, no matter by who. You're obviously the best for the job, but it's no skin off your back if they go with somebody else, everybody gets something, and gets paid.

Like trying too hard for that love interest that's out-of-your-league ... it's probably natural for people exposed to "big opportunity" for the first few times to try to oversell themselves ... and in the process give away the store to a business that's already demonstrated (by its big suc-cess) that it plays hard-ball.

Too bad it takes hard knocks to get past the star-struck stage. To quote Rodney, "It's a jungle out there!"

I think the problem is that you sold an idea that can easily be copied rather than a product. Perhaps an NDA might be the legislative path to take - but sometimes there is another approach:

There is a story, which may be an urban legend, but it exemplifies this story nicely: An Optimizations Research (OR) company tries to sell a product that can do crew scheduling for a airlines company. To show its power, they presented an optimized schedule where several million dollars could be saved, compared to their current models. The OR company was declined, but the airline took the data and implemented it.

What they did not know, was that the data presented were poisoned. Normally, when optimizing, you also account for the robustness of the model, so emergencies does not bring the whole system down. Being smart, the OR company had removed the robustness constraints, which severely hit the airline.

So the bottom line is: Try to poison the sales pitch. Know that you keep out something which is crucial to the solution, but does not impede the impressiveness. Make it into a game: If you choose us, you get to see the rest of the hand, what you don't know is if it is a royal flush or 4 of a kind :)

That's the last straw, I'm going to make my gilded egg purchases elsewhere.

Fabergé the present-day company has also made sure that an exhibition of Fabergé eggs in a museum in Baden-Baden may not be called anything with "Fabergé"[1].

I'll buy my gilded eggs at a local eggsmith instead.

1. in German: http://www.badische-zeitung.de/baden-baden/faberg-darf-nicht...

Burning bridges can be cathartic, but keep in mind that it is virtually impossible to only burn one bridge at a time.

What does this mean in this particular situation ?

Yup. This situation must be awful, and Matthew Evans has every reason for feeling so much more terrible even then he lets on in this post.

But he just pissed off IBM. And Faberge. And in all likelihood scared away a whole number of potential future customers who suddenly think 'if I talk to the Solid State Group, and then use someone else, are they going to bad mouth me to the whole world?'

Isn't it more like -- 'if I talk to the Solid State Group, and then steal their idea to use with someone else, are they going to bad mouth me to the whole world?'

Which doesn't sound like such a bad bridge to burn. Consider it a preventative measure to getting fucked over again.

You don't think Faberge will have a different version of events? After all, they gave what seems like a fairly detailed brief - in their mind they may think SSG added something 'simple' or 'obvious' to their own work, and they were entitled to use it.

I'm not saying that's the case - I really have no way of knowing. But the potential future clients are on the Faberge side of the pitching table, and may therefore see the story through that version.

Right - it's hard to pull things like this apart after the fact. Maybe they had already discussed something sort of similar previously. I know that when I've worked with design firms we have always tossed around a bunch of ideas before talking to the firm, and often just see what they come up with without our own ideas interfering. You're also dealing with a team at Faberge, not just one person...ideas percolate throughout the group beyond the people you're meeting with and once an idea takes hold there is no pulling it back.

What's so bad about charging for pitch work, if you're sensitive to this? I can understand feeling frustrated but I don't know that it was a deliberate snub.

I'm Matt's business partner.

To be honest we thought long and hard about going public with this, as it all happened quite some time ago now.

We've built our company on being open, up front and honest with people. I was sick of working for companies that would be economical with the truth in front of clients, and say whatever needed to be said in order to win some additional work. I think that being honest really is the best way of building long-term relationships with people. Eventually they respect you for it ;)

We know that this goes on all the time, and up to a point we just suck it down as it's part of the industry that we work in. We absorb the cost, so in the end people do pay for this sort of work, just not directly.

The reason we decided to write about this was due to the audacity of what had happened. Our ideas were pretty unique, we felt, and so it was clear to see what had gone on when the site eventually went live.

At the end of the day, if we lose business because of this, then it's probably the sort of business we would have no interest working on in the first place.

You guys made the right move. Harvesting ideas from pitch work is disgusting.

Great work/creativity on your teams part. Faberge should be ashamed of themselves.

If the key element that you're upset about was telephone guided co-browsing, I call "not unique".

You may very well have been the ones to introduce the idea/term to Faberge, but if you were the first ones to pitch AJAX or Flash to them, should they be barred from using that in their eventual solution, too?

AJAX and Flash is a generic technology, telephone guided co-browsing is a specific implementation, most likely using that technology. There's a big difference there, especially when Flash and AJAX are ubiquitous on the web and the phone guided browsing is more innovative.

Couldn't disagree more Jacob. They didn't badmouth IBM. They badmouthed the disgusting act of idea harvesting from creative companies.

I'm sure they wouldn't go public without the material to back up their claim.

True, but anyone can see that those bridges needed to be burned. Companies that behave this way should be outed.

Co-incidentally a very good friend of mine actually worked on the Faberge project at IBM, I saw a sneak preview about a month ago and it was very well implemented. I have sent him a link to your post.

It is unlikely that he will be able to share any significant details of IBM's side of the story with me because of client confidentiality, especially anything he would be willing to say publicly, but if he does I'll post here.

I have friends who work in the advertising industry, and they tell me that this is the situation with most clients.

One friend told me Google did this exact thing to them a few months back. Now, if Google's not above this sort of behaviour (and whatever you think about them, you must admit they tend to have a higher standard of behaviour than most other companies) you can imagine that others will also be willing to stoop to this.

That's quite a claim to levy with no details. I'd be curious to hear which of your friend's unique ideas Google stole.

And since when does Google contract out for development work?

I think swombat is talking about advertising, not development

My friend works for a very large advertising firm, and they're used to this happening with other clients too. I'm certainly not going to give any particulars, because I don't want to cause trouble for my friend. You'll have to choose for yourself whether to believe me.

It sucks that someone used your idea.

If it's any comfort, I pitched exactly the same concept to a purse designer a few months ago. (We didn't get that one, either -- no word on whether or not it was IBM.)

I am reminded of the perhaps slightly less practice of soliciting RFPs from companies with whom you have no intention of doing business. A buyer who wants to use a particular vendor but must convince upper management that his decision was made objectively often solicits RFPs from companies whose pitches easily can be discredited.

Isn't this the majority of RFPs? Most are just there for props as part of an attempt for some guy to sell his favourite company to the boss.

Unfortunately... I have seen this happen more than once, and even the big fish can get taken for this ride.

In posts here, I read of others independently coming up with the same scenario. You cannot be certain that your "pitch was stolen". In general, my belief is that if I can think of an idea then someone else can too. But I don't tell others about it unless I'm willing to let the idea go.

This seems plausible.

How could we be sure IBM didn't pitch a similiar idea in isolation? I don't know what the RFP looked like, but it doesn't seem crazy that two teams would come up with similiar solutions to the design constraints, even with.a relatively unusual idea such as this one.

I have a number of friends who work in creative sphere and this is extremely common in the industry.

Probably clients get away with this so much is because many creators shy away from describing these "misappropriations".

Why do clients do it so much?

IANAL, but pure ideas can have little legal protection, so legally(not morally mind you) they are in the clear.

You going in the open about this is actually healthy.

I am wondering how potential clients would look at an NDA in that industry. If they are not used to that, it might scare them away.

Is this article gone now? It would be a shame to see this story go away.

Edit: Looks like it's back now.

Yeah sorry, our site suffered from traffic overload and we quickly implemented some caching. :)

Document fully your pitch work and if possible, put in place NDAs

this.

I won't listen to a sales pitch that is under NDAs. But I also won't ask the seller to specify the solution for free.

They didn't approach Fabergé with a sales pitch out of the blue. I wouldn't expect a NDA for that. But Fabergé did ask them to come up with a pitch to relaunch their brand - I wouldn't come up with it and present it without some kind of document saying that they can't take the idea and run with it with someone else.

The pitch is a product. I would bill them for it.

It may not be that simple to pull it off. If you are the smaller fish in competition with IBM and IBM offers to do a pitch without charging for it (which they can afford), it's unlikely you would get paid for it.

Having some sort of agreement about IP, on the other hand, is possible but enforcing it would be costly any way. There's no easy solution.

I agree there is no easy solution, but, still, you have to set your limits somewhere.

When you are a small outfit, you cannot afford to work for free and you must make it perfectly clear to your prospects. If they can't respect that, you shouldn't try to serve them.

It's very easy to win a contract and then be completely crushed by your client. Believe me: I have seen it happen a couple times.

Thats it. i am not buying from Fabergé.

Although it's not like I could :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com