[HN Gopher] I helped reposition a database product that went on ... ___________________________________________________________________ I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1B in revenue Author : saadalem Score : 65 points Date : 2020-05-26 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.thefxck.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.thefxck.com) | tigerstripe wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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. | dharmab wrote: | I read it as it could have been making $1b at some point after | the SAP acquisition. | eloff wrote: | She mentioned it really took off after the SAP acquisition. | So it's possible. | nojito wrote: | survivorship bias in full swing here. | | Can't find any followup successes after this product | repositioning | andygcook wrote: | 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. | masonhensley wrote: | Second the recommendation. Came across her on twitter last | week, found the book & listened to most of it over the Memorial | day weekend via an audiobook. | haltingproblem wrote: | 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/. He also has an youtube channel. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-05-26 23:00 UTC)