I'm biased, but I think Launch School is interesting :)
1,697 karma · joined May 18, 2007
Most article writers aren't differentiating their audience enough, making their articles difficult to read for most people. There is a huge variance of "beginners", for example. Further, most developers who write these articles don't have a holistic learning framework in mind. Lastly, I'm seeing far too many technical tutorials just for SEO or attracting eyeballs lately. These articles are great for attracting attention but are typically technically shallow and add to the confusion rather than help.
The article actually mostly talks about how they scaled working with the accumulated data, and only a little about scaling the scraper.
Just like the interesting part about Google is how they process and index the data and not their crawler, the most interesting part of this article actually not the scraping, but how they handled all the data and processed it.
Edit: I found Github's policy on scraping. I hope the link brings some closure to this concern: https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service-dra...
See: https://www.quora.com/Is-website-scraping-legal-and-ethical
But I don't necessarily want to go down this rabbit hole here, as it detracts from the interesting technical issues outlined in the article. If you haven't read the entire article, I recommend that you do, because they had to overcome many interesting technical challenges while working on this.
The most successful model I've seen is hiring recent college grads who are sharp and willing to learn. They are cheap and will dive into the industry they're selling. A lot of funded startups operate this way, usually led by an experienced salesperson.
- we didn't love the recruiting industry. We loved the idea of running a business and building stuff. That's not why people pay you.
- we didn't understand market segments. Valley startups are different from large traditional companies are different from small companies. We also had many MBA and law programs as either paid users or leads, but we also fundamentally misunderstood their core problems. The go-to market approach needs to be different for each of those segments.
I could write a book about the mistakes we made. In the end, it's lack of experience, lack of segmenting the market and fully understanding the core value prop for each segment, and too much focus on building the app. We had a lot of fun figuring out edge cases and working on the engineering side of things. We didn't enjoy the recruiting industry, and didn't want to take the time to really understand our customers. To really understand your customers, you have to know their industry like an insider; that's how you close sales. If you can't do that, you should hire sales people who can.
Or, like most programmers, work on a problem in which you are already a customer.
The very first sale was done before our recurring pricing was even built. We had a contact who sold video interviewing to One Laptop Per Child without a product. He was a sales guy trying to build a product, but was having trouble executing on the implementation (as programmers, this is probably an old story). He saw our product and said it was exactly what he was trying to build. He agree to split the revenue with us 50/50, if we allowed him to use our product for his clients. That was our first and last enterprise check, and this was before our product was even fully finished. The One Laptop Per Child interviewing went very well, and we were able to get some minor publicity out of it. At that point, we thought we had something big, and wanted to pursue our vision of a SaaS product, instead of doing pure enterprise with the sales person who found us. We were one of the first video interviewing products, along with Hirevue, and was sure there was a market out there. At first, this was true.
Our first enterprise sale on our own was Airbnb, and was relatively easy. A lead from one of their departments sent in an email, and after a demo, they signed up for our $500/month plan. We created that plan only to provide a contrast to our $99/mo plan, which we thought would be the primary seller. Turns out $500/mo is nothing for enterprises, and soon that's the only plan anyone ever cared about. The Silicon Valley startups in general were much easier to sell to. Wildfire Interactive (later bought by Google) was also an early customer, as was odesk, and a couple of other startup companies. They were all very easy to deal with. They were abnormal though, as we found out later.
The real enterprise sales experience came from more traditional industries. For our product, that meant mostly recruiting firms. No one used the free trial, and everyone wanted a demo. They wanted to speak to someone over the phone, and do several rounds of demos. The first was usually with a smaller manager or analyst in HR. Then subsequent demos would be head of recruiting or HR, or other senior executives. Almost every demo ended with the clients being impressed by the product, but no commitment. We did demos with some of the largest recruiting companies in the US, and with some of the largest retail firms in the US (head of Marshalls/TJMaxx, for example). In the end they went with a bigger company because they couldn't trust a couple of scrappy guys with their business, even though the product was good. Our pricing was also off-putting, because it was way too low. Low prices send a signal of poor support and poor quality to senior executives. $500/mo is a rounding error to them, and we probably would've made a better impression by asking for $10k upfront and $2k/mo and assigned an account manager to each client so they have a point of contact.
That taught us a lesson - if you want to go after enterprise, it's not really about the product. It's all about sales and hiring account managers and showing that you too are a big company. In that sort of field, you almost have to take VC funding to "act big".
The alternative is to do what Basecamp did which is become thought leaders in your field, but we really didn't love the recruiting industry enough to even attempt to do that.
I'm not sure if this is the type of answer you're looking for, as this is more of a failed enterprise company. I've talked to a lot of small companies who do enterprise sales, and the success stories I've heard always revolve around building an in-house sales team and ensuring a successful on-boarding experience for customers by way of account managers.
That costs a lot. For bootstrapped companies, that's just not possible.
Legislators, DAs, judges and police adjust their behavior when sentences feel out of whack with the crime. Unfortunately, that empathy goes out the window when the people in charge are sentencing "other" people, who they don't empathize with.
Poor, uneducated people live by one set of laws, and middle-upper class people live by another set of laws.
Lots of business research says this is not true, and in fact, the opposite. This is why VW is the world's most popular car maker, and not Porsche.
First step is awareness, then next step is recognizing there's a problem. Your comment stops at the first step.
Changing your own 'hood is the first step to changing the world. There's not enough being said about serving your neighbors and getting to know your regulars on a first name basis.