
Small Projects, Big Companies - marceee0901
https://pioneer.app/blog/small-projects-big-companies/
======
goatherders
I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives
instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very
little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount
of grousing or changing from internal users will change that. Solutions that
sell upwards in an org (yammer for example) are very much the exception.

~~~
nordsieck
> I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives
> instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very
> little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no
> amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that.

It's possible to "sell" directly to users, but you have to have a particular
pricing structure: free to individuals.

This is what TravisCI, Dropbox and Slack did.

You actually have to have a really good product to pull this off, though.

~~~
kortilla
Slack? In every company I know that uses it, it was blessed by IT. It’s hard
to adopt for a subset of users in the company.

~~~
blowski
I've had the opposite experience. The developers start using Slack, then
invite PMs, BAs, QAs, etc, they work with. Then the PMs start using it to talk
to each other. Eventually, someone from compliance says "we need to pay for
this to have a full audit log", and someone from IT says "what's the JML
process for this?".

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chime
> The golden dataset everyone wants is the org chart. Who reports to whom. Who
> is new. Who has been at the company for a while. Find a way to get this data
> and sell it to companies. I suspect you’ll have many takers.

Please don’t. Please. Really. Please don’t. Training my users to fend off
social engineering attacks is hard enough as is. Please don’t use your talents
in this way.

~~~
thestepafter
I think this is the exact point of the article. Executives don’t think like
you, so if you want to make it big with your software, you have to change how
you think. Even if it means annoying middle management and their direct
reports.

~~~
trimbo
That might be the point of the article, but the point of the grandparent is
that the only method to get this data is to be seedy as hell. And that we
should aspire to use our talents for better things.

~~~
zanny
Better things don't pay, at all. The most betterest things you can do as a
developer - make infrastructure that makes other developers more efficient, or
invent protocols or fundamentals to build ecosystems and industries on - often
you get nothing for it. Because you made it open source, because you wanted it
to be useful. But to try to make it proprietary would have been to make it
useless.

Theres a reason probably 95% of software developers are employed to write
redundant repetitive corporate business software over and over and over again.
Everything else is being done philanthropically because anyone outside the
perview of a budget department at a big co recognizes the value in reaching a
consensus solution everyone uses because its a lot of work to make and is good
enough. Even corporate-adjacent software like databases, game engines, etc are
trending this way - Unreal, Unity, and Godot are all varying degrees of open
now in ways engines weren't even a half decade ago. The world is coalescing
around Postgres in a way unexpectable a decade ago under the tyranny of SQL
Server and Oracle SQL alongside a half dozen "competing" open source
databases.

Do you think those who contribute the most to Postgres get anything close to
"reasonable" compensation for having architected the database engine that is
now running likely trillions in business infrastructure and data management?

Their software is maximally useful - "the betterest things" \- but you can't
survive being maximally useful. You have to sacrifice how useful what you make
is to not be homeless in 99.99% of cases. You have to make worse, often
redundant things, wasting your time and the time of others in the process,
because thats the only (feasible and/or reliable) way corporations will pay
you to write software.

~~~
zomglings
Why do we have such an emphasis on making our tools open source?

How much does the license matter?

Would it be feasible to release source code for inspection while
simultaneously retaining exclusive rights to operate the software?

Would that garner a negative response from the developer community?

~~~
lukevp
This is like a source available license and we’re trending to that. elastic,
redis, I believe mongo, are all making versions of this that allow the source
to be public and even used for commercial purposes, but not for commercial
purposes that compete with the company.

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coffeefirst
Number 4 is ethical quicksand. Please don’t build a machine that guesses
personality traits based on personal data. It won’t end well.

~~~
knolax
In the past when people created arbitrary unquantifiable categories and then
proceeded to put people in them based off of unempirical/irrational voodoo it
was called superstition (ex. Astrology). Involve a computer in your rituals
and now it's AI.

~~~
coffeefirst
Or worse, phrenology, which sounds very funny today but at the time people
were applying it as if it were actually scientific.

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tarr11
The thesis seems to “build enterprise software” because those people have a
budget.

I enjoy reading people’s startup ideas. But this is a pretty uninspired list -
(“Better Google Groups”, “Better Zendesk”, etc) There are thousands of
solutions to these problems out there.

Not sure what makes them more ripe for a startup then bill splitting or pizza.

~~~
tylerrobinson
I think you said exactly why these are more ripe. Your customer has a budget
for it.

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robbiemitchell
Re: Zendesk

It's not just that ticketing products won't build next-gen reporting with
thematic monitoring and analysis, it's that big companies have more than one
source of customer conversations.

Actually answering the questions that matter when it comes to customer contact
-- "what's driving specific outcomes, and what about them has changed over
time" \-- needs to be done across all sources.

The company I work at (frame.ai) is an add-on with built-in connectors for all
the help desks like Zendesk, Intercom, Service Cloud, Help Scout, etc. for
this reason.

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arciini
> Legal-Doc-to-Google-Form

> Every founder goes through an identical process: downloading Microsoft Word,
> changing variables in a legal template, opening it in Preview, attaching
> their signature, and sending it over to the counterparty. Automate this
> process. Offer templates for common documents (company formation, SAFEs,
> etc). In time, you might become the store-of-record for company documents.

My friend was working on a product that does this called Formswift! I can
upload a PDF, have it convert to a set of form fields, and email it out pretty
quickly.

It's not the most glamorous-looking startup, but it works really well for the
mom-and-pop small businesses that are their usual clientele.

Take a look: [https://formswift.com/self-serve-
builder](https://formswift.com/self-serve-builder)

------
buzzkillington
> 3\. Backchannel.app

Having a hard time seeing this turn into anything but linkedin wankery. The
people who could give you honest responses either don't care enough to or will
start a 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'.

> 5\. Org Chart As a Service

Prepared to get sued out of existence. I was at a finance firm where all
external emails were sent to both legal and security. I had to redo security
training because I didn't report a phone call I got from an external source
that shouldn't have had my details.

And god help you if you do any of those ideas to EU citizens.

------
cj
> 7\. Legal-Doc-to-Google-Form

Shout out to Clerky who has been doing this wonderfully since 2011.

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mwilcox
I don't think you could come up with a better critique of the problems with
silicon valley today than "this product wouldn’t have billions of users, but
you could charge the elite few quite a bit for using it."

~~~
arman_ashrafian
could you elaborate

~~~
thundergolfer
Things are getting built for the 1% because they have the economic power, but
I'd imagine OP thinks this is undemocratic (which it is) and results in many
people becoming underserved by software companies (very likely).

~~~
anchpop
What is getting built for specifically the 1% (or .1%, etc.)? The only service
I can think of is Magic.

Additionally, what markets are underserved? This is an area I'm interested in
but don't know much about (except from my own anecdotal experience like the
fact that comparing costs of healthcare from different practitioners being
prohibitively difficult)

~~~
thundergolfer
> What is getting built for specifically the 1%

Should clarify that by "specifically for" I'd mean that the 1% have all the
money and thus practically all the decision making power. An example of the
distinction would be that though everybody engages with AdTech software the
software is built _for_ the 1% to make them money.

The 1% isn't a demographic that's targeted by some SaaS in this case, it's a
way of naming the rich who create the demand for a lot of software (they use
the software to make money) and control the (high-level) implementation of
most software in the world.

What's Magic?

~~~
anchpop
It's a service where you can hire an on-demand personal assistant for
$30/hour, [https://getmagic.com/](https://getmagic.com/). I never saw the
appeal.

------
netcan
The point on selling to managers is the big one, imo. Not users not the
company, at least not directly.

While the "decision maker" is not the user, they may be the project
lead/implementor.

Certain managers are looking for low risk, high visibility projects & notable
successes. They're expending a sort of social capital within their company,
putting themselves on the line.

Those are the managers that need to like your thing.

Companies selling to these people need to focus on those individuals, and
figure out what the hell "costs," are, irl, to them. It's not money

------
saadalem
Can someone elaborate on "Backchannel.app" thing ?

~~~
scarejunba
It's the common use-case: you don't know whether to trust someone. If you ever
know anyone who is in danger of being hired by a friend, your friend will ask
you how it was working with that person. This is usually a high-signal source
because you're not going to lie to your friend, your recommendation or anti-
recommendations are things you want to be meaningful, and because you have
direct evidence.

They want to scale this. I've discussed this same thing with friends before
but we couldn't find a way to keep it clean.

This is also a powerful advantage of a good network. You hear someone's
leaving some job through the grapevine and if it's accompanied with positive
feedback you hire this person. Or you're looking for a person and you ask your
network for the guy who can do it.

That's how I got my current job.

~~~
phkahler
But once you automate the backchannnel, it becomes impersonal. If someone is
vindictive they can ruin careers through such a system. If you dont actually
know a person, how can you trust their recommendation?

~~~
scarejunba
Well, we couldn’t figure out how to make things work and decided not to
pursue. Maybe the next guy will have better luck.

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alex-wallish
I'm curious who #6 would be valuable for. It seems like a cool thing to make,
but who is the customer?

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macinjosh
For #7 there is the great webmerge

[https://www.webmerge.me](https://www.webmerge.me)

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kilotaras
Number 7 Legal-Doc-to-Google-Form is being done by Axdraft (YC W19)

Disclaimer: I'm friends with one of the cofounders.

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joelrunyon
Number 7 seems like a no-brainer. Is there a reason this hasn't been done yet?

~~~
thestepafter
Pretty sure LegalZoom does this?

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dnautics
It's kind of disappointing that the pioneer "RFA" projects are all "more of
the same" SV. I don't see anything audacious , like "build a chip that
competes with Nvidia" or "build a pharmaceutical model that improves over what
we have", or "find a way to do high quality journalism without a paywall". For
that matter, I don't see any inkling that any of these ideas have anything in
particular to do with their self-styled goal of helping outsiders get in.

For reference, here is what their main page advertised as what they seek: "We
fund projects and startups built by ambitious outsiders... Apply with any type
of project you need help with. It could be a company, physics research,
journalism, or art..." The RFA is basically a message, "but really, this is
what we want"

I guess it's easier to talk big than take risks with big money.

~~~
zomglings
It may also be a case of different strategies for different channels.

If I were a VC, I might prefer to solicit these kinds of solid, boring
business ideas in an RFA and source moonshot ideas through my personal
network. If I looked for moonshots from my open application process, I would
probably end up wading through a lot of applications that would be time-
consuming to vet.

~~~
dnautics
That's what I would do as a VC, too, but then I wouldn't premise the
advertisement of the open application for my accelerator on something
misleading.

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lifeisstillgood
"Make something managers want. "

The PG quote reformulated...

------
CoderCV
We are building better zendesk here -
[https://provlem.com](https://provlem.com)

Still, many to go, but we have started to build better zendesk already.

