
We Built It, And They Didn't Come - kiteloop
http://www.slideshare.net/lfittl/we-built-itandtheydidntcome
======
programminggeek
You know, I'm a builder. I like to build things. But a business isn't about
building things, it's about selling things. You can build a real business with
a terrible to mediocre product if you are great at selling it. You can't build
a real business if you can't sell your product, no matter how good your
product is.

The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially
early in the business life.

~~~
stephengillie
This is why my self-driving RC-car platform is withering on the vine - I can't
get funding because I'm an engineer, not a salesman.

~~~
TimothyE
I had the same experience when I graduated and worked as an engineer. Ended up
deciding that I'd learn the business side myself and do an MBA. Now I see the
other side of the page, lots of business students who want to start something
up but can't make a product. If you want to commercialize go find someone
who's as passionate about business as you are about the engineering and you'll
have a much better chance

~~~
stephengillie
The funny part about this is my BA is in Business...

~~~
TimothyE
:) Guess it goes to show that passion will out. Got a link for your project?

~~~
stephengillie
gilgamech.blogspot.com

I haven't updated it in months.

------
sixQuarks
Whenever I see these slideshare links, I never get anything out of them.
Without hearing the actual audio or text that goes along with the slides,
they're not really useful to me. Anyone else have this issue?

~~~
quaffapint
I'll save you 70+ slides - It's all about marketing and sales, not design and
development.

------
aaronbrethorst
Regarding the slide about Kathy Sierra, find a spare hour and _watch this
video_ :

[http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-
building-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-the-
minimum-badass-user-business-of-software-a-masterclass-in-thinking-about-
software-product-development/)

Her talk alone justified every penny I spent going to BoS last year.

~~~
babuskov
I just started and couldn't stop until I've see it all. Great stuff. Thanks.

Any other BoS talks you recommend?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
They're all good, but Gail Goodman's talk was—I think—also a cut above the
rest: [http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-
constant-...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-
contact-how-to-negotiate-the-long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death/)

------
serverhorror
(This is not a flame or anything just my subjective impression. I know the
people who built this (well 2 of them) personally. So forgive me guys)

I was asking a few times how things were going and that I could need something
that sounds like what they were building -- granted on a very informal level
but still I asked and expressed my interested.

Problem was: They never came back to me and told me: Hey here's the stuff!
Wanna try?

I can make up reasons why, maybe because I moved to another country to take a
job, or after all they don't like me or whatever. To me it boils down to: _I_
(as in "the potential customer") was asking how far the product was and never
got a real answer.

My team has about 2000 Boxes to "operate"[1] and I manage only a single team.
Totaling to about 100K servers with different DCs spread over the world.

I'd think anybody who gets this kind of offer should try to get a foot in the
door. Even if the deal doesn't close people have heard about the stuff.

So the essence is to me: This one little slide where you see that
sales/marketing was way under represented in the team. Hell guys I know! you
can build stuff, but don't expect me (the customer) to keep asking and asking
and asking for wether or not it suits you to send me something I can work
with...

[1]: I currently live in an enterprise environment where DevOps or agile is
still something new and not to be trusted!

~~~
lfittl
Author here - thanks for the comment (and please don't worry about sharing
stories, its true after all!)

This was a big problem/mistake we made back then (and which isn't obvious from
the slides) - we just didn't let people try the product, since we didn't want
to be a hosting company ourselves.

We did show demos to people and did pilots in a few cases, but it would have
benefited us a lot to have a public installation where people could have tried
out the product.

I'm sorry we didn't get to work together then - there was certainly a lot of
interest that we managed (and filtered through) poorly.

Luckily I've learned from that (I hope!) :)

------
yeukhon
Here is my take after reading the slides from a student perspective. If we put
more resource on marketing would it mean at some point we will oversell our
service? In other words, we can only handle 100 users but now 120 users
because of the good marketing? Then we have to hire more people (but that
takes time too) to make the system more robust (from both deops and software
engineering). That's a problem, isn't it?

Would it be okay to say a startup should have a good estimate of how many
users they can handle at each cycle?

~~~
foxylad
Fear of overselling could kill your company - it puts a brake on everything
you do. Even worse, it gives you the perfect excuse not to market your product
to the max, and human nature means you'll actually market it close to the
minimum.

My philosophy is to ask "will it scale?" for every part of your business.
EVERY step - including sales, support and things like invoicing too. This adds
surprisingly little overhead, but if Jon Stewart mentions your product on The
Daily Show, you'll be popping champagne corks instead of blood vessels.

On the platform side, services like Appengine make this easy. But you need to
have plans in place to scale support, sales and everything else.

~~~
simonw
Rather than asking "will it scale?", I suggest asking "could it scale?".
There's no point in doing up-front work to make something scalable if you
don't know if it will be needed, but it's also important not to design
features that absolutely could not scale under any circumstances. If you can
think to yourself "if I need to scale this, I've got a rough idea of how I
would do it" you'll probably be fine. And if not... once again, not being able
to scale fast enough is a great problem to have (telling an investor "I don't
have time to talk to you, our server's can't keep up with all of our new
signups" is a great pitch).

------
curiousdannii
"Ideating"? Really? Yes I know it's not a new word, but really?

~~~
fotbr
After the IBM commercial, "Ideating" became code for "I'm going to take a nap"
where I worked at the time.

~~~
curiousdannii
Which commercial?

~~~
fotbr
This one:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOG_GHNVq0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziOG_GHNVq0)

