
I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1B in revenue - saadalem
https://www.thefxck.com/interviews/product-positioning-april-dunford
======
gk1
Agh.

April is terrific, and I agree that the right messaging and positioning can
have disproportionately high impacts on revenue (speaking from experience with
Netlify, Gravitational, and others), but this click-bait title is a huge
disservice to April, other marketers, and founders who may be dissuaded from
trying new messaging and positioning.

The actual story is that the person (April) was asked by a manager to
interview a bunch of customers. When they brought back the data, the manager
(or the team, collectively) acted on it by coming up with new product
positioning.

Some years later, after countless product iterations and _three_ acquisitions,
the product landed at a tech giant that does $30B/year. The author speculates
it was then responsible for $1B in revenue, though doesn't know for sure.

So...

It's fair to say "I was there early and it was neat to solve these problems
for a DB that later ended up at SAP." But to imply that your work directly
resulted to $1B in revenue--as this title does--is just nonsense. What the
F*ck were the editors thinking.

~~~
whack
Why so angry. The title reads:

> _How I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1 billion
> in revenue_

It doesn't say _" How I single handedly repositioned"_ or even _" How I
repositioned"_. The author literally _helped_ in the process that led to
repositioning. By uncovering a key use-case for the product, which then became
the key feature and selling point of the updated product.

And regarding the comment about $1B in revenue, is there any good reason not
to give her the benefit of the doubt? She literally worked with the team and
rubbed shoulders with them every day. A lot of non-public numbers get talked
about casually at the water cooler.

There seems to be a trend where people are hyper-obsessed with nitpicking
titles and calling out "clickbait". In this case, the article title is a
pretty great representation of the article's contents - or at least as great
as you can get in one sentence. I personally enjoyed the article, and was
hoping to read a discussion about the main points raised in the article, or
similar stories others may have. Instead, the top comment is an angry rant
nitpicking the article's title.

~~~
smnrchrds
Two points:

1\. The title does not make huge claims directly, but strongly implies it.
That's how I read it when I was skimming the front page of HN. It's like
writing an article with the title "I taught Michael Jordan basketball" and
then explain how you showed him how to throw a ball for 30 minutes when he was
the 5 years old. Or the old maxim that if you are a cashier at McDonald's, you
can technically say that you "process high-frequency cash transactions for
multi-billion dollar company on rotating supply-demand cycle".

2\. I don't like how the common advice for writing resume, which I can only
presume reflects what hiring managers want to see in someone's resume, says
you must quantify your achievements. You cannot just say I wrote the login
system. You must somehow tie it to a business objective and achievement
(increases sales by 7%, reduced support calls by 12%, etc). In reality,
projects are often team efforts and except for certain niches such as sales
and consulting, there is rarely a clear correlation between an individual
employee's actions and business's results. I don't like writing pretending
there is and writing it, and I don't like reading it.

~~~
noch
> I don't like how the common advice for writing resume, which I can only
> presume reflects what hiring managers want to see in someone's resume, says
> you must quantify your achievements.

It's not about résumés but about how the skill of measuring/estimating one's
own effectiveness/impact/productivity is positively correlated with successful
outcomes and rate of progress in life in general.

Recall Mike Acton's principle questions[0] that a goal-orientated individual
must answer:

>> \- I can articulate precisely what problem I am trying to solve.

>> \- I have articulated precisely what problem I am trying to solve.

>> \- I have confirmed that someone else can articulate what problem I am
trying to solve.

>> \- I can articulate why my problem is important to solve.

>> \- _I can articulate how much my problem is worth solving._

[0]:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/doiq8ovho1k9d4b/fired.pptx?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/doiq8ovho1k9d4b/fired.pptx?dl=0)

~~~
bonoboTP
Or more cynically, keep on doing your thing at your core, but do know that
people expect to hear stuff like that so consciously sit down and architect
some answers to those things. You can reinterpret and rewrite the story later,
but you need to have one. Also you don't have to get too attached to it and
believe it too much. Think of it as your interface towards society. They
cannot all have time to actually latch onto your inner person. You must
present to them all the handles you want to be grabbable by.

------
andygcook
April Dunford's book, Obviously Awesome, is very good and worth reading if
you're a founder or marketer (or both.) We reverse engineered her workshop and
did it as a team at the end of last year for my startup. Was very much worth
the day.

~~~
kristianc
Second this - it’s a great book, and one of the few truly actionable guides to
doing positioning (a lot of them get pretty academic).

Accessible to founders, and helps lay out the art and science of positioning,
and give a methodology for actually doing it. Would recommend it also to
technical people who are sceptical of marketing in general.

~~~
richsherwood
Do you have any similar books that you would recommend? I am always looking
for good marketing books but these days it's all some guru trying to sell
their book so hard to identify the solid through the noise.

~~~
kristianc
Josh Kaufman's 'Your Personal MBA' is excellent - its rare that you have one
book which goes through all of targeting, segmentation, positioning, marketing
planning, and how it all sits together. Often books will focus on one small
piece (like positioning, or value propositions) but without understanding how
these pieces sit into the wider whole it's hard to put them to really
effective use.

Byron Sharp's How Brands Grow is also a great book from one of the world's
leading marketing professors, and aims to lay out some iron laws about buying
behaviour. Byron is quite a spiky and contrarian personality, which makes the
book a lot of fun to read, but he also really knows his stuff.

------
redis_mlc
I'm going to give a lot of credit to April for this, and say the title is not
click-bait.

Long before sqlite, or CouchBase, there was SQL Anywhere.

And SQL Anywhere had something in the 90's that's still rare even today -
hands-off built-in production-ready replication.

(MySQL struggled for a decade to ship reliable replication after Yahoo paid
them $40k for the original statement-based replication, and Postgres still
doesn't have a great story out of the box.)

It's that multi-source production-ready replication that April shone a
spotlight on that made Sybase worth $5.8 billion when it was sold to SAP.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-acquires-sybase-
for-5-8-bi...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-acquires-sybase-
for-5-8-billion-but-why/)

So kudos to April for finding a huge diamond in the rough.

I've been to lectures on SQL Anywhere, but I hope some day to use it in a
project. It's a killer embedded database.

Source: DBA.

~~~
icedchai
I worked on some systems in the 90's that used Sybase SQL Server (AKA Adaptive
Server Enterprise, not the Anywhere version.) Maybe "Anywhere" is okay, but
you'd be laughed at if you suggested using Sybase SQL for a project these
days. It's legacy tech.

~~~
redis_mlc
> Sybase SQL for a project these days. It's legacy tech.

1) SQL Anywhere is not "Sybase SQL." Different products, with SQL Anywhere
being an embedded database that can run on a smartphone and replicate
bidirectionally to other masters.

Not many alternatives, even in 2020.

2) Legacy tech - when you care about your data, accept nothing less.

Fun fact: the #1 most popular and regarded RDBMS for the past few years is
considered to be MySQL, and it was the key technology that powered both Web
1.0 and 2.0. If that's legacy, I want more legacy.

Source: DBA.

~~~
icedchai
Yes, I know they are different products.

Early on, MySQL was known for anything but caring about your data. I've been
using it since the 90's. Without "strict" mode, fields would be truncated and
data types would be silently converted. Never mind the <5.x days where MyISAM
was the default table type.

------
wyck
This happened at the first start-up I worked at, 3 years in and almost
bankrupt, one large customer kept using the product for a different reason (
kinda hacking it all together), so we completely pivoted to survive with this
customers needs and it became a huge success. That pivot was towards such a
niche market that no one was really in the space, and no one outside it would
have really even know about it.

~~~
achow
Can you please give a link to the product page - assuming that you
commercialized it for others as well.

~~~
wyck
No sorry, but I can tell you it provides video/text/meta data archiving for
many countries' parliaments and state legislatures.

------
willart4food
It was the year 1999, remember that? I was working at a startup and we were
preparing to IPO. I got a cold call from a - I kid you not - "Color
Consultant"; I don't know why but I listened to her instead of hanging up, her
spiel was:

"Do you know [Inser name of recent IPO]? Well they hired me and I changed the
color of their corporate identity from Black on Green to Green on Black; well
4 months later they IPO's raising $250 million at a $1+ billion-dollar
valuation".

WUT?

Her implication was that she was taking credit for the successful IPO.

So, there it is.

I am not saying that April's contribution was not useful, but... everything in
a long process is useful, but not 1 single contribution is responsible for the
entire (or majority) of success. Except for grit!

~~~
pkaye
This reminds me of an early job. It was my first job as a mechanical engineer.
I was lucky enough to work in a R&D team on an entirely new product line.
Crazy but rewarding work from months on end. Near completion, I was moved to a
side team to help out with other smaller projects. At this point the marketing
guy comes in to decide on the name and color of the machine. So they bring in
the consultants and in the end decided to stay with the name the engineers
gave it and the same color as older machines (beige and black.) And the kicker
was at the launch party they forget to invite me but invited the marketing guy
who spent a couple days helping out. What a punch in the guts it was.

~~~
abraae
I've been in more than one meeting where, after lengthy discussion about
product name, the group circled again back to the original (temporary) name
created by the developers.

And in that time it had somehow subtly become adopted by marketing as theirs
:)

(To be fair, picking names is hard, even if you are in marketing. I'm sure
there's plenty of science, but one of the best ways IMO is to just blather
them all around for a while and see what feels right/sticks after a day or
two).

------
dblohm7
I did my first internship working at Sybase on SQL Anywhere. Some great people
worked at that office. Even some of the original Watcom guys were still there.

Fun fact: SQL Anywhere was still compiled using Watcom C++ long after the
latter was discontinued as a commercial product. Most of the people who worked
on the compiler still worked there, so they maintained it internally until SQL
Anywhere finally switched over to MSVC.

~~~
zaphirplane
> MSVC

I thought it ran on multiple operating systems

~~~
dblohm7
It does. I'm referring to the Windows builds.

------
astroalex
Completely unrelated to the content of the article, but I find it so annoying
when interview responses are rendered in italics.

For contrast, here's a nicely typeset interview from the NYTimes:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/25/magazine/hann...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/25/magazine/hannah-
gadsby-interview.html)

~~~
huangc10
Not sure why you're downvoted. I completely agree. I couldn't get past the
first answer because of the italics. Why would someone do that. I'm sure it's
an interesting Q&A, but I just can't read it.

------
tigerstripe
I searched online - seems that when SAP bought Sybase, net revenues of Sybase
were around $1b - this was only one product in their portfolio.

Is it true that the product was making $1b / year?

~~~
jcampbell1
It looks like the product was conceived in 1992, Watcom was first acquired in
1994 by Powersoft, which was bought by Sybase in 1995. SAP bought Sybase in
2010.

I'd bet the product has seen significant growth in the mobile / IoT era.
Applications that work offline and synchronizes later are a pain to build.
Seems like the kind of infrastructure that exists in every police car these
days.

~~~
teleforce
Despite the promise of Starlink of pervasive internet connection, there are
always blind spots where connection just do not exist or just pain
intermittent.

Personally I think the future of desktop applications should be designed
around the premise of localhost first and cloud second. The ability of the
locally host application to synchronize to the cloud or central repository
(similar to rsync and Git) should be the default not the other way around (I
am looking at you Microsoft Teams). Technically there should be no different
between people working independently with their local copy of data to be
merged centrally later, and an offline application with an intermittent
internet connection.

Now with readily available VPN tools like Wireguard becoming more popular the
notion of using web applications for distributed authoring and collaboration,
etc, is not necessary anymore. But if you insist to use web based technology
there is always protocol like webdav to the rescue. If you do not want either
of them (VPN and webdav), the recently announced SMB over QUIC can be a very
good alternative solution [1].

[1][https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-
ove...](https://redmondmag.com/articles/2020/03/02/microsoft-smb-over-quic-to-
windows.aspx)

------
nojito
survivorship bias in full swing here.

Can't find any followup successes after this product repositioning

~~~
haltingproblem
Yes, more like narrative fallacy akin to sayin that one feature we added to a
product was responsible for its success.

------
andai
To read the article normally, open the web inspector and add

    
    
      em {
          font-style: normal;
      }

------
yuvalr1
I think that the talk here about taking the credit for the 1 billion is
missing the point. What I think she wanted to emphasize is that they almost
shut down a product that made more than 1 billion, and that she took part in
the process that saved it.

~~~
Traster
I think a lot of the discussion in here is about how whoever wrote the title
managed to destroy any chance of this interview getting any meaningful
discussion. Which I think is appropriate, because it's a blog about marketing
that manages to market their blog about marketing with the kind of deftness I
expect from my 8 year old daughter's rendition of _Let it go_.

------
haltingproblem
tl;dr version - Desktop DB product. She called customers, found most were not
using, one was and was crazy about the product. Product "repositioned" around
that use case. End of story.

I am sure there is a lot more to Dunford's book that this article reveals but
IMHO product positioning is the wrong takeaway.

Product positioning, which sounds management consultancy speak like "product
strategy" is top-down. Implies near perfect knowledge of the marketplace,
customer use cases, existing alternatives..... Anti-thetical, if not opposite,
to the Lean Startup method. Lean implies you have incomplete information but
you map out the profitable niches by experimentation. You want to build that
which is needed, not build and position it later.

Recommend Robert Fitzpatrick's Mom test instead.
[http://momtestbook.com/](http://momtestbook.com/). He also has an youtube
channel.

------
hodgesrm
SQL Anywhere was an amazing product. What's left out in the article is that it
was also really fast.

I had an assignment in 1998 to benchmark it against another pocket database.
SQL Anywhere was 100x faster. On the Excel throughput graphs I had to use
right and left Y axes for each product. Otherwise product #2 was just a flat
line on the X axis. ;-)

------
listenallyall
This is a strange story. Did the company really believe there was a large
market of people who "had to manipulate some data and write structured
queries, but you didn't want to do it in Excel"? What was the actual incentive
or opportunity that the product was meant to fill? Did anyone acknowledge the
popularity of dBase, FoxPro, FileMaker (with Access coming soon)? What was the
product failing to do for the 90% of customers who bought it then abandoned
it, surely some common themes must have arisen via all her cold calls -- and
why didn't they address those issues? On the other hand, Oracle compatibility
and sync surely weren't trivial to build, how were these features not already
a major part of the marketing strategy?

------
blunte
Lesson: know your customers and their needs.

------
sankalp221
Please add RSS to the site. Would've loved to subscribe via my Feedly reader.

~~~
nstart
They do have RSS. Unfortunately it's truncated at /interviews/rss.xml

------
suyash
Click Bait Alert

------
ykevinator
This is stupid

------
abiogenesis
> And we had almost killed the product!

Well, one could argue that you _killed_ the product. You just reused the
source code for a new product. A product is much more than the software.

