Comment by ozim

3 days ago

People underestimate enterprise market.

Usually you can see it when someone nags about “call us” pricing that is targeted at enterprise. People that nag about it are most likely not the customers someone wants to cater to.

5 comments

ozim

projektfu 3 days ago

When I was a software developer, I mostly griped about this when I wanted to experiment to see if I would even ask my larger enterprise if they would be interested in looking into it. I always felt like companies were killing a useful marketing stream from the enterprise's own employees. I think Tailscale has really nailed it, though. They give away the store to casual users, but make it so that a business will want to talk to sales to get all the features they need with better pricing per user. Small businesses can survive quite well on the free plan.

Dylan16807 2 days ago

I'm sure everyone "wants to" land a many million dollar deal with a big company that has mild demands, but that doesn't mean those naggers are bad customers. Bad customers have much more annoying and unreasonable demands than a pricing sheet.

ozim 2 days ago
I don’t think anyone lands contracts with “mild demands”.
Most of the time you want to cut off ‘non customers’ as soon as possible and don’t leave ‘big fish’ without having direct contact person who can explain stuff. People just clicking around on their own will make assumptions that need to be addressed in a way no one wastes time.
- Dylan16807 2 days ago
  
  > Most of the time you want to cut off ‘non customers’ as soon as possible
  If you mean this literally, one of the best ways to turn non-customers into customers is to give them a way to pay you. Which means telling them the price. If you're implying something else by ‘non customers’ then I'm missing the implication.
  > and don’t leave ‘big fish’ without having direct contact person who can explain stuff
  You can give a contact person and have a list of prices.
  > People just clicking around on their own will make assumptions that need to be addressed in a way no one wastes time.
  Making everyone call you to negotiate is going to waste time.

ignoramous 2 days ago

Definitely there exist customers one must fire, but the flip side is, some of them might have genuine complaints.

  ... an extremely popular marketing tool ... sending an equally excessive amount of data above what they were paying for. They were far less adamant about the product, and on some days I didn't even want them as a customer. If there was a minor blip in the service, they were the first to complain. Reminder, [Sentry] was still a side project at the time so I had a day-job. That meant it was often stressful for Chris and I to deal w/ customer support, and way more stressful dealing with outages.

  We had one customer who loved the product, and one who didn't. Both of these customers had such extreme volumes of data that it had a tangible infrastructure cost associated with hosting them. We knew the best thing to do was to find a way to be able to charge them more money for the amount of data they sent. So we set off to build that and then followed up with each customer.

  To our surprise, the customer that loved the product didn't want to pay more. The customer who was constantly complaining immediately jumped on the opportunity. What's the lesson to take away from this? 

  ... when I was a teenager I worked at Burger King, and there was an anecdote I will never forget: for every customer that complains, there are nine more with a similar experience. I've cemented this in my philosophy around development, to the point where I now believe over rotating on negative feedback is actually just biasing towards the customers who truly see the value in what you're offering. The customer that was complaining really valued our product, whereas the customer that was happy was simply content.

A $7 Subscription, https://cra.mr/a-seven-dollar-subscription / https://archive.vn/IWS0A (2023).