

Startups: You Should Value Software More - smalter
http://wadefoster.net/post/49775946303/startups-you-should-value-software-more

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ckluis
HA! If you make pricing decisions for one of these companies please ignore the
next paragraph!

This is one of the reasons enterprises will pay good money for software (even
bad software) - because 30,000 users saving 5 minutes per month (1 hr per
year) @ $20 an hour is still $600,000 savings per year.

Save them 1 hour per month = $7,200,000 Save them 1 hour per day = $30,000,000

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dllthomas
Though this depends on what kind of time is saved. If I go from thinking while
shuffling papers to thinking while sitting at my desk, my company isn't saving
money.

This obviously isn't to say that I want to spend more time shuffling papers,
and of course having to deal with a task means a context switch (which can
sometimes be more expensive than the task itself), my point is simply that the
analysis needs to run a bit deeper than "how much time is this saving?"

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ckluis
100% agree, but on repetitive tasks that can be automated it can mean massive
time savings.

Think scanning a pallet with 1,000 units via RFID vs manually (just an example
I realize there is hardware & software in the example).

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dllthomas
For sure. I didn't mean to imply that there weren't cases where automation is
a big win.

