[HN Gopher] I helped reposition a database product that went on ...
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2020-05-26 23:00 UTC)