[HN Gopher] Software is no longer sold; it's adopted ___________________________________________________________________ Software is no longer sold; it's adopted Author : mooreds Score : 97 points Date : 2022-03-18 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (orbit.love) (TXT) w3m dump (orbit.love) | raspyberr wrote: | "Community is the new pre-sales" makes me sick. It's already | impossible to tell what fake or real in reviews. Now marketers | are sliding themselves like rats into communities. | ClumsyPilot wrote: | We live in pist truth society trully, you dont know what is | real politically or in products you buy | GarethX wrote: | That's not the point being made in the article, though. It's | not saying marketers should do community, but rather that | companies should invest in community instead of marketing for | mutual benefit (members and company). The follow-on Value | Creation > Value Capture piece I think makes it clearer: | https://orbit.love/blog/value-creation-beats-value-capture | sophacles wrote: | Be nice to the rats - they are fairly intelligent creatures | with feelings you know. | hypertele-Xii wrote: | That slid themselves into our communities and made us sick. | | Hey I like rats, but he's not wrong in his choise of words. | | Now rats are paying restitution as lab test animals and | making us healthier. | marcodiego wrote: | I wonder if this new trend of software needing periodic payment | to function will boost FLOSS adoption. | _jal wrote: | For me personally, absolutely. | | I loathe subscriptions. It is the mental overhead. Since the | shift to subscriptions, my personal spending on software is | down something like 80% from what it was ca. 2015. | | Replacements mainly have been open source software or things | I've written. | jpgvm wrote: | For me it depends on what that subscription entails. | Personally I only pay for the Jetbrains toolbox because it | also includes a rolling perpetual license so if I ever do | walk away from it I'm not leaving the software behind, just | updates. | auggierose wrote: | But the perpetual one is a year behind what you are | currently using, so that makes it hard to walk away :-) | scarface74 wrote: | No, | | On the consumer side Office 365 offers a lot of functionality | that requires a server component. | | On the other hand, who will work on polished software for end | users for free? | [deleted] | matchagaucho wrote: | Witnessing the numerous FB Pages, Discord channels, and sub- | Reddit communities focused on enterprise software, it seems | communities will form organically, whether or not initiated by | the company. | | The most useful software communities I engage with tend to be the | organically curated ones. | altdataseller wrote: | Yep, that's right. There's almost very little you can do | directly to foster these communities, except to make your | product delightful to use, and to add these wonderful | experiences throughout your product, that makes ppl want to | recommend it. | danuker wrote: | You could browse them and listen to feedback (but beware of | implementing said feedback when it misaligns with | sustainability). | bryanlrobinson wrote: | I think communities (wherever they are), end up reflecting on | the products/software. If you're a software company not | actively working to manage and provide value to the community | (whether in your platforms or elsewhere), those communities | still reflect on the company. So probably best to actively work | to maintain and provide value to them. | polote wrote: | It is well marketing written, but don't match reality. I'm sorry | but most companies have Teams not Slack, most companies have | Teams not Zoom. | | > From Slack to Figma, Typeform to Twilio, Atlassian to | Airtable... many of today's fastest-growing companies are those | who are not only product-led but community-driven. | | Atlassian is clearly not product-led today and they are clearly | not one of today's fastest growing company | | > vendors have had to adapt to this new landscape. Go-to-market | strategies have changed with sales-led replaced with product-led. | [...] they've adjusted their budgets accordingly. Take Atlassian, | for example; in 2020, their Sales and Marketing spend was 18.6% | of revenue compared to an industry average of 38.7% | | Atlassian as always been famous for being no-Sales, so this is | clearly not a shift for them | altdataseller wrote: | Right. In 2016, Sales & Marketing was 19% of revenue, so | Atlassian was always a low spender on sales. Narrative | violation. | [deleted] | sys_64738 wrote: | Software is there to solve a business problem and is used for | such. Companies do not want to spend labor where it's not needed | so you do end up with communities growing around specific | software tools for a particular need. The Linux kernel for | example. Every company want a COTS solution so they don't need to | specialize and produce their own. Software is a zero sum game | where commodity features aren't paid for but customization is. | Only huge companies with big R&D budgets can make substantial | software investments. As soon as a commodity solution is reached | then the business problem is solved and isn't paid for and people | lose their jobs. It's the whole reason AI is big to replace | software investment in the long run. | danielmarkbruce wrote: | This makes sense for some subset. It doesn't make sense for large | enterprise HR software, financial ERP software, prison management | software, anything where lots of people use it in an | administrative manner and it is by nature boring. | dsugarman wrote: | exactly, this line in particular sounds ridiculous with those | counter examples in mind. | | >In this product-led world, folks won't simply use whatever | tool they're given. They want to use the same tools at work as | they choose to use in their own time. | | I do think PLG is taking over most software | pixiemaster wrote: | product-led is just a marketing term led by sales people who | don't have a clue about how to formulate ,,product quality | matches needs of users" </rant> | altdataseller wrote: | I think product-led is not simply ensuring you have product- | market fit, or whether you're satisfying the needs of users. It | goes further than that. It's to ensure every step/detail of | your product is built to encourage people to want to recommend | it, or talk about it. Every small detail, from the cute mascot | you might use in your logo, to features that help people | express their identity, or feel good about themselves. Of | course, it varies from product to product. | | The market is filled with tons of products that fulfills the | needs of users. But very few of them have a community of | enthusiastic users that want to recommend it to others. | pixiemaster wrote: | exactly. | | and good products without a mascot have been recommended in | the past, just because they are good products. | sirjaz wrote: | We need yo kill SaaS. It was a better world when you sold | software and the license. Be it in physical form or digital. In | the world we have now you lose access to your info the moment you | don't pay. This has already caused countless businesses to go | under. Especially since covid. People need to wake up. | softwarebeware wrote: | I think the hyper-focus on customer desires is a misstep. The | best and most widely-adopted software in history has been | software designed by a couple of visionaries (or at most a small | team) who ignored what users _said_ they wanted and gave them | what they needed instead. | beebmam wrote: | I think these kinds of generalizations are pretty absurd, as I | can immediately think of counterexamples. Bourne shell (and by | extension, bash) is by far one of the most common pieces of | software used in the world, and has been hated by virtually | everyone since it's release, including admissions by its own | author that it is an inferior shell. It's certainly one of the | most-widely adopted pieces of software in history; no shell | comes anywhere close except maybe Microsoft DOS/cmd during a | small time window. | chefandy wrote: | Maybe you mean visionaries _started_ those projects. Did any | remain relevant without significant user and designer input? | | Standing up an idea well enough to change how people see a need | is an incredible accomplishment but it's entirely different | from single-handedly knowing how to make it work best for | people who use it. Or for anybody other than you, really. | | But underestimating the importance of, or even disdain for | deliberate usability work is pervasive in FOSS. Most developers | see interfaces as a place to expose the user-facing | functionality so people can interact with your software. To a | user, the interface _is_ the software. Bad interface=bad | software. | | When projects ignore that, they end up making Gimp. | | You'll have a hard time selecting a sample of serious photo | editors where fewer than 80% have tried Gimp-- yet _maybe_ %5 | use it. Fewer will have heard of the younger commercial | Affinity, but more will use it. | | However, in the adjacent and oft-overlapping world of vector | art, the FOSS project Inkscape is very, very popular-- even | among professionals. They aren't hostile to usability changes, | actively seek outside interface design perspectives and have a | usable application because of it. | | Inkscape does more good for a broad swath of vector artists | because of their good design. Gimp has a product enjoyed by | open source enthusiasts with light photo editing needs. | | _Free + great enough to generate word of mouth_ will trump | _expensive + great + advertising_ in almost every case. | great_wubwub wrote: | Sure, but I think you have some survivor bias here. How many | people turned out some software that they thought people needed | but which nobody did? I don't have any examples at hand but | it's gotta be a whole lot. | mooreds wrote: | > How many people turned out some software that they thought | people needed but which nobody did? | | Search "shutting down" on HN for a list: https://hn.algolia.c | om/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... | GreenWatermelon wrote: | Man... it's like a graveyard and the titles are tombstones. | mooreds wrote: | I often think about how little code I've written over the | decades is still being run. Not much. | | It reminds me of what is important in life. | polote wrote: | The point is not that every opinionated piece of tool is | good, the point is that the best ones are opinionated. | visarga wrote: | 99% of github? | rjbwork wrote: | Ahh, an optimist! | jacobr1 wrote: | The best model I've read about this is to separate feedback | loops into two categories: | | Problem Discovery - listen to users to understand where they | struggle, but ignore their proposed solution and desires | (except to the point it helps you understand the problem they | are attempting to communicate). | | Solution Discovery - design a solution that addresses the | problem, and validate it with real usage. Importantly not just | talking, but users need to actually try it out. | rubiquity wrote: | This doesn't seem remotely true. Look at the sales and marketing | spend of ServiceNow, Snowflake, CrowdStrike, and countless | others. There's tens to maybe even hundreds of billions of | dollars being spent every year on selling software. All that | money is being used to ram software down throats at the CISO/CIO | level. It's another conversation as to whether it's worth it to | spend all that money on sales, but it definitely doesn't | translate to software the end users are choosing. | | This feels like the 2000s again with the annoying enterprise | software companies of that era. Perhaps the hangover of this will | be another decade of new comers making software people actually | want to use. | mooreds wrote: | But how did those companies start? | | Sure, you'll eventually need a salesforce when you get to that | company size (330M in revenue in one quarter in 2022 for | Snowflake: https://investors.snowflake.com/news/news- | details/2021/Snowf... ). | | The same is true with the other ones you mentioned. This post | does a great job of explaining why: | https://bothsidesofthetable.com/one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-... | | But for most companies starting out you can't hire an | enterprise sales force (nor would they be effective). I don't | know what size it makes sense to start hiring sales folks | (don't have a ton of context) but my guess is by the time you | have $10M/year in revenue, you have some kind of sales team. | | But how can you drive adoption at the early-mid stages of a | business? That's the question this post answers. | hguant wrote: | It depends on your field. If you're a services company (as | in, consulting and subcontracting) you're dead in the water | unless you have a sales team day 0, even if that sales team | is just the founder working over time. Those places live and | die by their contracts. | | There's a large number of small (<5) person companies that | work entirely like that. They're not _sexy_ and they're never | going to be unicorns, but they make a good amount of money | for the people involved when they inevitably get purchased by | some larger group. | mooreds wrote: | That is a good point. I would say that this post is not | aimed at consulting companies, which typically don't have a | community strategy (unless they are a participant in | another organizations community as a way of driving | business). | | I know a couple of consulting companies that are doing just | fine, but I agree, they'll need a sales team. Will they | need an enterprise sales team? Probably not, it'll be the | founders and once they get to a certain size a sales team. | But not the kind of sales team that Snowflake has. | 323 wrote: | > _How community drives software adoption_ | | This is not a new thing. Microsoft famously said something like | "we don't like software piracy, but we'd rather you pirate | Windows than use something else". Adobe said the same about | Photoshop. | badrabbit wrote: | "In soviet Russia, software adopt you!" | moltke wrote: | It always was; the "software market" was always fake. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-18 23:00 UTC)