[HN Gopher] Software is no longer sold; it's adopted
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Software is no longer sold; it's adopted
Author : mooreds
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-03-18 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (orbit.love)
(TXT) w3m dump (orbit.love)
| raspyberr wrote:
| "Community is the new pre-sales" makes me sick. It's already
| impossible to tell what fake or real in reviews. Now marketers
| are sliding themselves like rats into communities.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| We live in pist truth society trully, you dont know what is
| real politically or in products you buy
| GarethX wrote:
| That's not the point being made in the article, though. It's
| not saying marketers should do community, but rather that
| companies should invest in community instead of marketing for
| mutual benefit (members and company). The follow-on Value
| Creation > Value Capture piece I think makes it clearer:
| https://orbit.love/blog/value-creation-beats-value-capture
| sophacles wrote:
| Be nice to the rats - they are fairly intelligent creatures
| with feelings you know.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| That slid themselves into our communities and made us sick.
|
| Hey I like rats, but he's not wrong in his choise of words.
|
| Now rats are paying restitution as lab test animals and
| making us healthier.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I wonder if this new trend of software needing periodic payment
| to function will boost FLOSS adoption.
| _jal wrote:
| For me personally, absolutely.
|
| I loathe subscriptions. It is the mental overhead. Since the
| shift to subscriptions, my personal spending on software is
| down something like 80% from what it was ca. 2015.
|
| Replacements mainly have been open source software or things
| I've written.
| jpgvm wrote:
| For me it depends on what that subscription entails.
| Personally I only pay for the Jetbrains toolbox because it
| also includes a rolling perpetual license so if I ever do
| walk away from it I'm not leaving the software behind, just
| updates.
| auggierose wrote:
| But the perpetual one is a year behind what you are
| currently using, so that makes it hard to walk away :-)
| scarface74 wrote:
| No,
|
| On the consumer side Office 365 offers a lot of functionality
| that requires a server component.
|
| On the other hand, who will work on polished software for end
| users for free?
| [deleted]
| matchagaucho wrote:
| Witnessing the numerous FB Pages, Discord channels, and sub-
| Reddit communities focused on enterprise software, it seems
| communities will form organically, whether or not initiated by
| the company.
|
| The most useful software communities I engage with tend to be the
| organically curated ones.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Yep, that's right. There's almost very little you can do
| directly to foster these communities, except to make your
| product delightful to use, and to add these wonderful
| experiences throughout your product, that makes ppl want to
| recommend it.
| danuker wrote:
| You could browse them and listen to feedback (but beware of
| implementing said feedback when it misaligns with
| sustainability).
| bryanlrobinson wrote:
| I think communities (wherever they are), end up reflecting on
| the products/software. If you're a software company not
| actively working to manage and provide value to the community
| (whether in your platforms or elsewhere), those communities
| still reflect on the company. So probably best to actively work
| to maintain and provide value to them.
| polote wrote:
| It is well marketing written, but don't match reality. I'm sorry
| but most companies have Teams not Slack, most companies have
| Teams not Zoom.
|
| > From Slack to Figma, Typeform to Twilio, Atlassian to
| Airtable... many of today's fastest-growing companies are those
| who are not only product-led but community-driven.
|
| Atlassian is clearly not product-led today and they are clearly
| not one of today's fastest growing company
|
| > vendors have had to adapt to this new landscape. Go-to-market
| strategies have changed with sales-led replaced with product-led.
| [...] they've adjusted their budgets accordingly. Take Atlassian,
| for example; in 2020, their Sales and Marketing spend was 18.6%
| of revenue compared to an industry average of 38.7%
|
| Atlassian as always been famous for being no-Sales, so this is
| clearly not a shift for them
| altdataseller wrote:
| Right. In 2016, Sales & Marketing was 19% of revenue, so
| Atlassian was always a low spender on sales. Narrative
| violation.
| [deleted]
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Software is there to solve a business problem and is used for
| such. Companies do not want to spend labor where it's not needed
| so you do end up with communities growing around specific
| software tools for a particular need. The Linux kernel for
| example. Every company want a COTS solution so they don't need to
| specialize and produce their own. Software is a zero sum game
| where commodity features aren't paid for but customization is.
| Only huge companies with big R&D budgets can make substantial
| software investments. As soon as a commodity solution is reached
| then the business problem is solved and isn't paid for and people
| lose their jobs. It's the whole reason AI is big to replace
| software investment in the long run.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| This makes sense for some subset. It doesn't make sense for large
| enterprise HR software, financial ERP software, prison management
| software, anything where lots of people use it in an
| administrative manner and it is by nature boring.
| dsugarman wrote:
| exactly, this line in particular sounds ridiculous with those
| counter examples in mind.
|
| >In this product-led world, folks won't simply use whatever
| tool they're given. They want to use the same tools at work as
| they choose to use in their own time.
|
| I do think PLG is taking over most software
| pixiemaster wrote:
| product-led is just a marketing term led by sales people who
| don't have a clue about how to formulate ,,product quality
| matches needs of users" </rant>
| altdataseller wrote:
| I think product-led is not simply ensuring you have product-
| market fit, or whether you're satisfying the needs of users. It
| goes further than that. It's to ensure every step/detail of
| your product is built to encourage people to want to recommend
| it, or talk about it. Every small detail, from the cute mascot
| you might use in your logo, to features that help people
| express their identity, or feel good about themselves. Of
| course, it varies from product to product.
|
| The market is filled with tons of products that fulfills the
| needs of users. But very few of them have a community of
| enthusiastic users that want to recommend it to others.
| pixiemaster wrote:
| exactly.
|
| and good products without a mascot have been recommended in
| the past, just because they are good products.
| sirjaz wrote:
| We need yo kill SaaS. It was a better world when you sold
| software and the license. Be it in physical form or digital. In
| the world we have now you lose access to your info the moment you
| don't pay. This has already caused countless businesses to go
| under. Especially since covid. People need to wake up.
| softwarebeware wrote:
| I think the hyper-focus on customer desires is a misstep. The
| best and most widely-adopted software in history has been
| software designed by a couple of visionaries (or at most a small
| team) who ignored what users _said_ they wanted and gave them
| what they needed instead.
| beebmam wrote:
| I think these kinds of generalizations are pretty absurd, as I
| can immediately think of counterexamples. Bourne shell (and by
| extension, bash) is by far one of the most common pieces of
| software used in the world, and has been hated by virtually
| everyone since it's release, including admissions by its own
| author that it is an inferior shell. It's certainly one of the
| most-widely adopted pieces of software in history; no shell
| comes anywhere close except maybe Microsoft DOS/cmd during a
| small time window.
| chefandy wrote:
| Maybe you mean visionaries _started_ those projects. Did any
| remain relevant without significant user and designer input?
|
| Standing up an idea well enough to change how people see a need
| is an incredible accomplishment but it's entirely different
| from single-handedly knowing how to make it work best for
| people who use it. Or for anybody other than you, really.
|
| But underestimating the importance of, or even disdain for
| deliberate usability work is pervasive in FOSS. Most developers
| see interfaces as a place to expose the user-facing
| functionality so people can interact with your software. To a
| user, the interface _is_ the software. Bad interface=bad
| software.
|
| When projects ignore that, they end up making Gimp.
|
| You'll have a hard time selecting a sample of serious photo
| editors where fewer than 80% have tried Gimp-- yet _maybe_ %5
| use it. Fewer will have heard of the younger commercial
| Affinity, but more will use it.
|
| However, in the adjacent and oft-overlapping world of vector
| art, the FOSS project Inkscape is very, very popular-- even
| among professionals. They aren't hostile to usability changes,
| actively seek outside interface design perspectives and have a
| usable application because of it.
|
| Inkscape does more good for a broad swath of vector artists
| because of their good design. Gimp has a product enjoyed by
| open source enthusiasts with light photo editing needs.
|
| _Free + great enough to generate word of mouth_ will trump
| _expensive + great + advertising_ in almost every case.
| great_wubwub wrote:
| Sure, but I think you have some survivor bias here. How many
| people turned out some software that they thought people needed
| but which nobody did? I don't have any examples at hand but
| it's gotta be a whole lot.
| mooreds wrote:
| > How many people turned out some software that they thought
| people needed but which nobody did?
|
| Search "shutting down" on HN for a list: https://hn.algolia.c
| om/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Man... it's like a graveyard and the titles are tombstones.
| mooreds wrote:
| I often think about how little code I've written over the
| decades is still being run. Not much.
|
| It reminds me of what is important in life.
| polote wrote:
| The point is not that every opinionated piece of tool is
| good, the point is that the best ones are opinionated.
| visarga wrote:
| 99% of github?
| rjbwork wrote:
| Ahh, an optimist!
| jacobr1 wrote:
| The best model I've read about this is to separate feedback
| loops into two categories:
|
| Problem Discovery - listen to users to understand where they
| struggle, but ignore their proposed solution and desires
| (except to the point it helps you understand the problem they
| are attempting to communicate).
|
| Solution Discovery - design a solution that addresses the
| problem, and validate it with real usage. Importantly not just
| talking, but users need to actually try it out.
| rubiquity wrote:
| This doesn't seem remotely true. Look at the sales and marketing
| spend of ServiceNow, Snowflake, CrowdStrike, and countless
| others. There's tens to maybe even hundreds of billions of
| dollars being spent every year on selling software. All that
| money is being used to ram software down throats at the CISO/CIO
| level. It's another conversation as to whether it's worth it to
| spend all that money on sales, but it definitely doesn't
| translate to software the end users are choosing.
|
| This feels like the 2000s again with the annoying enterprise
| software companies of that era. Perhaps the hangover of this will
| be another decade of new comers making software people actually
| want to use.
| mooreds wrote:
| But how did those companies start?
|
| Sure, you'll eventually need a salesforce when you get to that
| company size (330M in revenue in one quarter in 2022 for
| Snowflake: https://investors.snowflake.com/news/news-
| details/2021/Snowf... ).
|
| The same is true with the other ones you mentioned. This post
| does a great job of explaining why:
| https://bothsidesofthetable.com/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-...
|
| But for most companies starting out you can't hire an
| enterprise sales force (nor would they be effective). I don't
| know what size it makes sense to start hiring sales folks
| (don't have a ton of context) but my guess is by the time you
| have $10M/year in revenue, you have some kind of sales team.
|
| But how can you drive adoption at the early-mid stages of a
| business? That's the question this post answers.
| hguant wrote:
| It depends on your field. If you're a services company (as
| in, consulting and subcontracting) you're dead in the water
| unless you have a sales team day 0, even if that sales team
| is just the founder working over time. Those places live and
| die by their contracts.
|
| There's a large number of small (<5) person companies that
| work entirely like that. They're not _sexy_ and they're never
| going to be unicorns, but they make a good amount of money
| for the people involved when they inevitably get purchased by
| some larger group.
| mooreds wrote:
| That is a good point. I would say that this post is not
| aimed at consulting companies, which typically don't have a
| community strategy (unless they are a participant in
| another organizations community as a way of driving
| business).
|
| I know a couple of consulting companies that are doing just
| fine, but I agree, they'll need a sales team. Will they
| need an enterprise sales team? Probably not, it'll be the
| founders and once they get to a certain size a sales team.
| But not the kind of sales team that Snowflake has.
| 323 wrote:
| > _How community drives software adoption_
|
| This is not a new thing. Microsoft famously said something like
| "we don't like software piracy, but we'd rather you pirate
| Windows than use something else". Adobe said the same about
| Photoshop.
| badrabbit wrote:
| "In soviet Russia, software adopt you!"
| moltke wrote:
| It always was; the "software market" was always fake.
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