
Ask HN: How does a product like Snowflake pitch itself to customers - statictype
Snowflake is, from what I understand, a database engine.<p>To get value out of it, a developer has to write sql and integrate some other reporting tool to actually view results.<p>How are they positioning the product to customers? As a tool for developers? For business analysts (will business analysts want to even write sql)?<p>How are they picking up million dollar contracts when the output of their product is essentially a stream of data that needs another tool to visualize it and the input needs to be written by an engineer?
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fragmede
Snowflake is solidly a B2B analytics app. It is, and I don't mean this
dismissively, nothing new. They do it _very_ well, and their market
performance agrees with that notion, and they are innovating within their
field, but data warehousing is complicated, especially at scale and they're
not breaking new ground by providing a better solution for that. For a small
company's analytics, I can download a CSV file and do all my analysis in
Excel. But at a bigger company, when that "CSV file" is terabytes, possibly
even petabytes of data, it's going to take a bit more of work to deal with it.
For companies who's core expertise _isn 't_ shoveling around data like that
and loading it into a database, it's reasonable to contract with a vendor to
do that. Snowflake is just one among many other vendors who do this.

To answer your question, what's great is that anybody who can SQL can use
this, developers and business analysts alike. Developers who want data to back
up product decisions will use this to answer, eg, how many customers use
feature A vs feature B, and then use that information to choose to build
either feature C or feature D. Business analysts want answers about the
business, and if they have to write SQL to do it, then they'll partner with
someone who can, or more likely, just learn SQL. (This is why "data scientist"
is a hot new career path.)

Corporations that are in a place to be giving Snowflake a million dollar
contract most likely already have a similar system already in place, either
homegrown or via a competitor. (Eg Amazon Redshift.) Thus, their positioning
depends on the customer, but for customers that previously already had a
million dollar contract just with a different vendor, their focus is on why
their product is super-amazing-awesome compared to their competition. (Which,
and the market agrees, it is.)

patio11 has a thread on just how unseen some of the niches of software is -
[https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1235919318329643008](https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1235919318329643008)

Software is like an iceberg - there's a wild world of software that none of us
have heard of. It seems strange that it's possible for Snowball to succeed
given that it's "essentially a stream of data that needs experts in order to
use it", but the same thing is true about the Internet in the 1980s.

~~~
brodouevencode
> Corporations that are in a place to be giving Snowflake a million dollar
> contract most likely already have a similar system already in place

100% correct. We're in the middle of migrating to SF right now, moving from
some very old homegrown systems and a patchwork of systems from the past
couple of years of M&A. The real selling point for us was the unified
interface, and the ability to plug in systems (new and old) just by creating
connectors. There is a view layer that can look across various backends and
make it look, to the user, like it's all the same data set.

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stevesycombacct
They found me on LinkedIn last year and scheduled a sales call, which I agreed
to. I'm in consulting, so I need to know about their product in case a client
asks for it, or in case I need to recommend their product as a solution to a
client's case. They specifically marketed to me its database performance and
its use in the cloud, which I won't get into here, since I'm not their
spokesperson.

To date, I haven't had a specific need for Snowflake, but that's down to my
client's situations, not any issue with the company or its product. If that
situation changed, it would indeed result in contracts.

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thorin
Pretty much what the other guy said. I'm likely to be working with Snowflake
soon hosted on Azure. Existing warehouse is on Oracle and is costing >1
million pounds per year in hosting and licensing. For enterprises with
expensive licenses on Oracle or SQLServer and expensive hosting costs
Snowflake offers a more attractive package to the business. Technically I'm
not sure it will be too different, I'll update in a couple of months!

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rawgabbit
Snowflake advertises itself as a pay as you go complete data warehouse with a
simple interface, primarily SQL. It can installed on Azure or AWS etc. It is
self-tuning; no database admin required. It has built in COPY commands to
ingest parquet files and Tasks and Streams to perform scheduled data
transformation. That is it has all the tools needed to perform data
warehousing out of the box.

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kwillets
That's a good question; I'm curious how the sales process works.

It's not winning on performance or price/performance. I suspect it's other
features such as easy onboarding and an ETL (or ELT) toolchain. They claim
it's self-managing, as so many products have before.

B2B over the web/cloud circumvents traditional enterprise sales (and billing!)
channels, so I guess that's part of it.

