Comment by freedomben

Comment by freedomben a day ago

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I'm a CTO who makes purchasing decisions. There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.

If your website doesn't give me enough information to:

1. Know enough about your product to know that it will (generally speaking) meet my needs/requirements.

2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.

Then I will move on (unless I'm really desparate, which I assure you is rarely the case). I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.

That's not to say that calls never work or don't have a place, because they definitely do. The key to using the call successfully (with me at least) is to use the call to get into true details about my needs, after I know that you're at least in the ballpark. Additionally, the call should be done efficiently. We don't need a 15 minute introduction and overview about you. We don't need a bunch of small talk about weather or sports. 2 minutes of that is ok, or when waiting for additional people to join the call, but beyond that I have things to do.

I know what my needs are. I understand you need some context on my company and needs in order to push useful information forward, and I also understand that many potential customers will not take the lead in asking questions and providing that context, but the sooner you take the temperature and adjust, the better. Also, you can get pretty far as a salesperson if you just spend 5 minutes looking at our website before the call! Then you don't have to ask basic questions about what we do. If you're willing to invest in the time to get on a call, then it's worth a few minutes of time before-hand to look at our website.

freedomben a day ago

Oh I might add another huge thing: Have a way to justify/explain your pricing and how you came to that number. When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay. That's going to backfire on you because after you send me pricing, I'm going to ask you how you arrived at those numbers. Is it by vCPU? by vRAM? by number of instances? by number of API calls per month? by number of employees? by number of "seats"? If you don't have some objective way of determining the price you want to charge me, you're going to feel really stupid and embarrassed when I drill into the details.

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  • jhallenworld a day ago

    >you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay

    It should be based on the email address used. If, for example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and you get a discount.

    My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.

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    • WJW a day ago

      More like the people who appear rich subsidize the repairs of the people who appear poor. Probably usually fairly accurate but it's amusing to think about the edge cases where the truly rich don't feel the need to dress wealthy anymore and get their TV repaired for cheap.

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      • Aeolun a day ago

        One of the big benefits of wealth is that everything costs less. This is just an extension of that.

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      • snowfarthing 9 hours ago

        According to "The Millionaire Next Door", this is actually a surprisingly common "edge case". The "rich" are the people who diligently save and invest, get their hands dirty at what they do, and don't care about pretenses -- they'll drive a beat-up pickup truck because it helps them at their work, and they can take it out for fishing and hunting, and they can have it paid off -- while that pretty Porsche is going to just sit in a driveway and rust, because it's too nice to take it for a run doing the things you want to do!

        Whereas the "high income" people -- typically doctors and lawyers -- are spending lots of money on nice suits and cars and homes, but have little to show for it in terms of actual wealth.

        Having said that, I don't mind the rich who aren't pretentious getting a discount. I'd call it a "pretention tax". What's further ironic is that the former tend to appreciate paying a little extra if it ensures that a job is well-done, whereas the latter tend to skimp on paying extra, and often get the poor-quality results you'd expect.

        And yes, there's exceptions to both categories, too -- indeed, it's not as if it's hard to live within your means as a doctor or a lawyer, if you don't mind looking a little "lower class" as a result (and if your clientele are the working class, this may even be a bonus!). But it's nonetheless a fascinating dynamic to keep in mind!

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      • 0_____0 a day ago

        I know at least one millionaire who seem to own maximum one pair of pants that doesn't have holes in it. Especially in tech, it can be hard to tell. The one conversation I had with a FAANG CEO, he was wearing athletic clothes, as if he'd ducked into the office during a run.

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    • IG_Semmelweiss a day ago

      Correct. Market value is not the cost of making X plus a margin. Many people get that wrong.

      Marker value is what someone else is willing to pay.

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    • yndoendo a day ago

      If I remember correctly, Amtrak does something like this for pricing their train tickets. It is not the cost of going from A to B. It is priced so the more populated area travelers, North East Coast, pay higher to help reduce the cost for those in the middle of the USA. This helps make tickets more adorable for the more poor individuals.

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    • shepherdjerred a day ago

      > This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.

      tbh I have no problem with this as long as the work was done well.

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    • carimura 14 hours ago

      I've always wondered about this. My wife always tells me to close the garage when folks come to the house to give us bids on jobs so they don't see the cars. Not that a Tesla indicates wealth but I guess it indicates something? I tell her she's paranoid... maybe she's not.

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      • Latteland 12 hours ago

        I think your wife is right. I have a tesla and I always think about that indicating something. Also Tesla's are so ubiquitous it doesn't matter that much like it used to be, and you can get a used one for pretty cheap. But that rich guy reputation still persists.

        And then now that we have Elon Musk following the Howard Hughes self destructive cycle (greatest video game player AND ceo of 5 companies who posts all day on social media), there's a very possible negative takeaway - especially in tech it's hard to know. I live in a ridiculous world, I actually see 'got mine before elon was a doofus' bumper stickers. We should all try to judge each other on actual behavior and choices. I'm an asshole completely separate from buying a tesla a decade ago, people.

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        • cafard 8 hours ago

          Henry Ford was a real piece of work for a good while. I'm not sure how much it would have affected his sales--not that he was selling to the upper end of the market.

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  • ascorbic a day ago

    >just making the price up based on what you think I can pay

    It's called supply and demand, and it's the way things have been priced since the dawn of commerce. The only time the price is based on cost is when the market is competitive enough to drive that price down, and the cost acts as the floor. Even then, if you can get your costs below those of your competitors then it's your competitors cost that can act as the floor.

    The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.

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    • radicalcentrist 18 hours ago

      No it's not called supply and demand, it's called price discrimination. The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives the market as a whole. Anything further is an anti-competitive attempt to vacuum up more of the buyer surplus.

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    • ratherbefuddled 14 hours ago

      > It's called supply and demand

      Supply of the kinds of services under discussion here is rarely limited in any practical sense, so scarcity does not play.

      > The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.

      This ignores opportunity cost. Very few buyers have infinite cash, they do tend to have infinite ways they could spend money though and many of them will give a far better return than a couple of percent.

      In reality if you're adjusting your pricing to try and extract the most you think you can get away with from the customer, you will lose a substantial number of buyers - and probably more so with buyers who have a technical mindset.

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    • Latteland 12 hours ago

      And also, the customer has the money and gets to make a choice. Sure, supply and demand is a real thing. But there is also a notion of friction blocking the sale. Everyone absolutely hates considering a new purchase that doesn't give you clarity on details and price.

      So that CTO says I'm probably not going to bother with you if you don't have a clear price. I also practice this purchasing way. Everyone should. So sure, someone in sales will fight to the death to justify their strategy of obfuscation and charging what the market will bear, and to try to justify their presence in the sales process with some kind of commission and argument about how they caused pain for the buyers and got more money. Meanwhile, company B sold me a widget for whatever, I already paid them, there was no salesperson wasting time on either side.

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      • immibis 12 hours ago

        As a corporate executive, buying things for good prices is a substantial part of your job. You're not some grandma looking for a movie to watch who will bail if she can't figure out how much it costs. Sure, you can refuse to buy things altogether, but it won't be very good for your company - these kinds of companies seem to have been broadly outcompeted by ones that do buy things.

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        • freedomben 8 hours ago

          Sure, but as a corporate executive you also have a limited amount of time. If you invest all of your time on inefficient sales processes then you may only get to consider one or two or three providers. If instead you eliminate the ones that have bad signs (like heavy price obfuscation) you can instead focus on the vendors that don't do those things. In the end you might not get the best product and/or the best price, but the same is also true if you waste all your time jumping through sales hoops and aren't able to examine more players.

          If jumping the hoops guaranteed the best price, then I would agree with you, but I would vehemently disagree that it does.

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    • j1elo 12 hours ago

      What you're saying is akin to someone entering a clothes shop and the store clerk asking what they work on, to gauge the T-shirt prices according to the client's salary.

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  • ozim a day ago

    You know it might be also priced on “this guy feels like a pain to work with after the way he asks questions, let’s put the price up”. There is no way to objectively explain that without having person offended - so I am going to put a price I think will cover me dealing with BS questions or attitude of the customer and if he walks it is still a good deal for me.

    We might think that companies need every single sale - well no sometimes you want to fire a customer or not take one on.

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    • TristanBall a day ago

      You don't have to change you process, so you can still explain it rationally.

      Just leave off the "then I multiplied by 10" part.

      Which I did by accident once ( not by 10, but it was still substantial )... but it turned out the customer was delighted because we were still 50% vs their existing vendor.

      Enterprise pricing is a farce.

      I very much agree with the poster above about vendors disqualifying themselves.. another red flag for me is the Two Suits and Skirt pre-sales Hydra Monster that big vendors love to send around, to scare you into letting them capture all the value that their purporting to provide you.

      And yes, the above shows I've been both sides of the fence. I felt it was going to be good experience, and it was, but I have regrets too.

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  • JoshTko a day ago

    I'm confused by this, why would sales team know in detail the vRAM contribution to sales price, and how is it relevant to your purchase decision? I've never heard of enterprise/SAAS pricing to be based primarily using cost plus pricing.

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    • freedomben a day ago

      Some products (especially infrastructure) still bill based on (outdated and often irrelevant) core counts and memory count. A few years ago I talked to a seller of a PDF library/toolkit who wanted to know my production and staging core count before they would quote me a price. Explaining to them that it runs in a serverless function on-demand was fun, especially because they would say things like, "well, what's your average?" I would often reply and say my average is defined by a function where you take the number of active users (which itself is highly elastic) and calculate for average runtime at 4 cores per user for approximately 50 ms per page (which page count is highly elastic too) and sum to get "average core use per month". Needless to say it was like pushing a rope.

      More common now with SaaS seems to be employee count or some other poor proxy measurement for usage. I love actual usage based billing, but some of the proxies people pick are ridiculous. Like, if I have 5 seats or 500 employees, but 2 users spend 6 hours a day in the software and then 10 others maybe look at it once a quarter, paying the same for those is absurd and is not usage-based billing at all.

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      • mattzito a day ago

        I spend a lot of time on pricing and packaging of SaaS software and the challenge is real. Everybody says they want simple pricing, which often aligns to seats or MAU - but then they want usage-based pricing, but then they're concerned about unpredictable costs and spiky usage.

        Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a free lunch - you can have simple and predictable but you will have some users that you pay for that aren't getting value. You can have usage-based billing, but then you run the risk that anyone who uses an antipattern for the product will suddenly cost you a ton (or consume all of their allocated quota and be dead in the water, which is differently bad).

        The more flexibility you offer, the more complexity you're putting onto customers and sales teams to understand what's the best way for them to consume the software.

        There's also a lot of market pressure to "follow the crowd" - even if you have an option that is (in your mind) more customer friendly/favorable, if you are structuring your pricing differently than the competition, there will be customers who are concerned that they're not getting "a good deal" or concerned that the structure will end up being less favorable to them over time (after all, why does everybody ELSE do it this other way?). Sales reps also prefer pricing strategies that are at least structurally consistent with other products on the market, because it makes their lives easier.

        Similarly, it's very difficult to change pricing nad packaging later on - changing price is relatively simple, but changing units of billing or retiring an old offering can be an extremely difficult task.

        (disclaimer: these are just my own opinions, everything is hard)

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      • ricardobeat a day ago

        Usage-based pricing makes sense when you’re buying infrastructure products. For (most?) other things, the price is based on value, not material cost.

        The cost of that PDF generation might as well round up to zero, but developing the tech cost multiple man-years of work. How do you price that “objectively” unless you’re given a breakdown of the company R&D expenses, operation costs and margins. That is not a reasonable request. Either you’re happy paying $X because it solves your problem and brings equivalent value to your business, or you’re not.

        I do agree seat-based pricing is often ridiculous, but that’s a problem for the free market to solve. Alternatives usually pop up given enough demand.

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      • derefr a day ago

        What you described is likely usage-based, in the sense that the (presumably cloud) vendor usually has to reserve a certain amount of resources per user, “just in case”, because they don’t know / can’t predict your activity pattern. Same reason VMs are still charged for when started but idle: they reserve their CPUs.

        What people really want, when they say “usage-based billing”, is outcome-based billing. They want to get charged money whenever they hit the button in your software that makes them money (or, for a cost-center, saves them money.)

        Think of e.g. tax prep companies. (For the average Joe employee), they don’t charge you money up-front; instead, they take a part of the net-positive return they fully expect to find you. They make you happy, then take a slice of your happiness at the exact point that they’re making you happy. Outcome-based billing.

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      • xp84 a day ago

        Yes. There’s nothing more obnoxious to me than products like Figma where my company has a limited number of full licenses. They are super stingy with what my account type can do, so the 2 times per year when I need to get involved inside a Figma document or even a FigJam board I have to go begging for someone else’s license, but it would be way too costly to pay as much per seat for the entire company as we pay for our designers, for whom that’s obviously a core tool.

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    • adammarples a day ago

      Isn't that exactly how a lot of things are priced? Ie. Snowflake. Pay for compute, pay for storage, etc.

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      • malfist a day ago

        Some things are sure. But not most. You wouldn't expect to go to McDonald's and they tell you (or even know) how much the fertilizer to grow the corn that feed the pigs that made the bacon contributed to the price you pay for a burger

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      • freedomben a day ago

        Yes especially enterprise software marketed toward platforms/infrastructure usually are priced this way. SaaS products aimed at consumers or high-level business (like HR, Accounting, etc) often don't, so depending on what people's experience is mostly they may think differently

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  • lowkey_ 9 hours ago

    I've always agreed with this take but now as a B2B founder doing sales, I think it can honestly be interpreted a lot more charitably.

    I get on an initial discovery call to learn a few things, like:

    * How much will it cost us to support you based on what you're using our platform for?

    * How expensive is this problem for you today?

    * From there, how much money could we save you?

    My goal is to ensure a (very) positive ROI for the lead, and that we can service them profitably. That's how I put pricing together. It seems pretty reasonable.

    Our platform is also rather extensible, and I want to make sure that they'll understand how to use it and what it's for, instead of becoming an unhappy customer or wasting their own time.

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  • lotsofpulp a day ago

    >When you have to "learn about my company" in order to give me pricing info, I know you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay.

    That is how 99% of sellers do business. The upper end of the price range is what the buyer can pay, the lower end is what their competitors are asking for. Some sellers are lucky to have few competitors, so they can waste more of the buyers' time trying to narrow down exactly how much they can or are willing to pay.

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    • TeMPOraL a day ago

      Which is why you shouldn't engage with those sellers and companies they represent unless you have no alternative and are truly desperate.

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    • willcipriano a day ago

      This is how a lot of consumer businesses are pricing now.

      Then they use the same consulting firm as their competitors to set prices.

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      • wat10000 a day ago

        It’s how any sensible business sets prices. Your cost sets a floor, that’s all. You set the price at whatever level makes the most money.

        Many prices end up being a little higher than costs, but that’s because competition drives prices down close to the floor, not because businesses set out to do that.

        Why do grocery stores have coupons? It’s not because they’re charitable. It’s because coupons are a way to charge higher prices to people more willing to pay. Trying to figure out your customer’s willingness to pay and matching that with your price is nothing new or unusual. The tactics just change when the purchase is big enough to have dedicated salespeople.

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      • vajrabum a day ago

        That is actually price fixing and illegal. Not that in the current regulatory environment that there's likely to be enforcement.

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    • mhb a day ago

      So the college model.

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  • risyachka a day ago

    The price is set by the market. It never was and never will relate to the seats/resources used/etc.

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    • immibis 12 hours ago

      The price is set by the market as a function of some sellers charging by seats, others by resources used, etc, and some buyers preferring simple pricing models, others preferring usage-based, etc.

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  • exe34 9 hours ago

    is that how you present the price to your own customers? or do you operate on value based pricing?

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nu11ptr a day ago

For #2, someone once said there are two pricing models (was it Joel Spolsky? Don't recall..):

$0 - $999 - direct sale/download, pricing on website

$50,000+ - full sales team, no pricing on website

And essentially not much in between... this has perhaps changed a bit with SaaS, but this is still semi true.

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  • egorfine a day ago

    Oh yes it was Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/11/18/price-as-signal/

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    • ChrisMarshallNY a day ago

      That's like a restaurant, with no prices on the menu.

      "If you have to ask..."

      I would definitely like to never have to talk to another "people person," and no-calls-but-we'll-give-you-the-info-you-need policy sounds great.

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      • TeMPOraL a day ago

        You mean a restaurant that gets away with serving mediocre food for ridiculous prices, because the "no prices on the menu" gimmick generates enough status/prestige to compensate for any customer dissatisfaction? I.e. the restaurant equivalent of being famous for being famous.

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        • ChrisMarshallNY a day ago

          Wouldn't know. I generally avoid those joints.

          My tastes are a lot more plebeian.

          Unfortunately, I have to eat in one, every now and then, but I always walk away disappointed.

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dimatura a day ago

Agreed. As someone in a place to make purchasing decisions, if I can just sign up and try something without having to "jump on a call" and sit through a demo, I'm more likely to do so. I'm more willing to meet afterwards if I like what I see.

As it happens, a while back I did exactly this for a company after reading a post about their launch on HN. In a later conversation with their CEO, I found out we were their first customer!

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  • eastbound a day ago

    You can go to the SpaceX website and see the price of rockets. You can literally enter your credit card numbers to pay for it.

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    • dimatura a day ago

      I'd wait to see if they have a good black friday sale.

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    • mushufasa a day ago

      you mean... the gift shop with the model rockets?

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      • WJW a day ago

        No, go to https://rideshare.spacex.com/search?orbitClassification=2&la... and click through a couple of times. It literally asks you for your contact data and credit card number so you can pay 650k USD for launching 15 kg to LEO.

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        • wat10000 a day ago

          Technically you’re just paying the $5,000 deposit with your card. They probably don’t want to eat the card processing fees on the full amount and will request some other sort of transfer for the remainder.

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b3lvedere 21 hours ago

At the beginning of this year i had some reflection on projects at two clients. While the businesses of both clients is vastly different, they were kinda using the same setup: One business critical system. The rest was mostly standard stuff and both companies are about the same size.

Client 1 contacted us by phone they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager and project leader had no clue of the clients business. The approval of the project took about two months. Engineering was involed after the approval. The project took more than a year, mostly because of communication chaos on both sides. Everybody was annoyed.

Client 2 contacted us by email they needed to upgrade their IT. The appointed account manager emailed engineering. After some emailing back and forth for a couple of days, both parties agreed on the project details. The approval of the project took about fifteen minutes. The project took about a month. We got cake.

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  • cutemonster 17 hours ago

    It's simpler to forward an email to the relevant people and agree on goals, than to forward a phone call :-)

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randerson a day ago

My least favorite is when I relent and get on their call, and after 30 minutes of answering their questions, they say "OK, next step is we'll schedule another call with our product specialist, because i'm just a sales guy and i didn't really understand most of that."

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  • sjburt a day ago

    The worst part is that the sales person has to go back and pitch their team on whether it’s worth their time to get back to you.

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griomnib a day ago

This sort of cuts both ways, I’m on the small business selling side.

Sometimes somebody will want a call, I’ll do my dance, tell them the price, then they try to nickel and dime to get a lower price - which isn’t on offer. That blows a lot of my time.

On the other hand, the software I sell solves some novel problems at scale and is designed to be extensible - so in cases where somebody wants to build on the foundation I’ve built I really do need a call to figure out if there’s a missing feature or similar I’d need to build out, or if there’s some implementation detail that’s highly specialized to a given situation.

By and large my evolving strategy is to not have a fixed price listed online, and to reply to emails promptly with pricing with offer to have a call for complex situations.

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  • ryandrake a day ago

    As someone else posted, SpaceX lists their prices to launch things into space. Your software situations are more complex?

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    • jaredklewis a day ago

      That doesn’t seem like a logical inference to me.

      A house construction contractor doesn't have a price list for the sake of obscuring prices, nor because house construction is more complex than space flight.

      It's because houses are custom and thus prices are too variable to list in any meaningful way.

      For a SaaS product with significant custom integration work, it seems reasonable that prices might also vary in the same way.

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      • kijin 20 hours ago

        A small-scale contractor doesn't have a price list, but a real estate developer who builds an entire subdivision at a time definitely has a price list. There might be taxes and fees on top of that, but everyone expects that anyway. At least the base product should have a clear price tag.

        If I can tell in advance whether your SaaS product costs $10/seat/mo or $100/seat/mo, I'll probably feel more comfortable asking whether the custom integration work will cost $50k or $100k.

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    • griomnib a day ago

      There are many companies that charge “x” per weight of “y” to go from “a” to “b”. How they get “y” from “a” to “b” is complex, but the actual pricing is quite simple compared to bespoke business solutions. It’s just freight.

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    • dilyevsky a day ago

      > SpaceX can provide unique interfaces for Payloads with mechanical interfaces other than 8", 15", or 24". The Sales team will contact you with pricing if you select this optional service.

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burnte 12 hours ago

I'm 100% agreement, right down to the CTO/CIO role. I just don't do business with them, period. I have a strict rule not to do business with people how cold call/cold email, hide info, and force pointless meetings. Once salesmen realize that I'm actually a very low maintenance customer who just knows what they want, they love me, I'm free commission to them because they never have to expend energy on me.

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giancarlostoro a day ago

Going to add the most important thing: It is perfectly fine to end calls early if it feels like it has phased itself out. Don't be afraid to do so! Everyone on the call is costing someone else a lot of income. This goes for internal or external calls.

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  • freedomben a day ago

    Yes, seriously. When a sales call is scheduled 30 minutes but 5 minutes in we have a conclusion, you get a lot of good will points from me if you thank me for my time, ask me if there's any other questions I have, and then conclude the call. You can even make this explicit with a quip like, "I'll give everybody 20 minutes back!" then it's clear you are being courteous with our time.

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    • giancarlostoro a day ago

      Some people dont know when to end calls early and everyone else is too polite to tell them to end it. I had a manager who made it a point to suggest to end a call early. I try not to force calls to end early unless I know everyone on the call. I notice when its all devs its really easy to suggest ending early vs when non devs are on a call unless a dev manager does it.

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mooreds 14 hours ago

We sell a devtool (FusionAuth, an authentication server).

We have clearish pricing on our website (the options are a bit confusing because you can self-host or pay for hosting), but we do have our enterprise pricing available for someone, and you can buy it with a credit card.

In my four years there, we've had exactly one purchase of enterprise via the website. But every enterprise deal that I'm aware of has researched pricing, including using our pricing calculator. Then they want to talk to understand their particular use case, nuances of implementation and/or possible discounts.

Maybe FusionAuth and its ilk are a different level of implementation difficulty than keygen? Maybe our docs aren't as good as they should be (the answer to this is yes, we can definitely improve them)? Maybe keygen will shift as they grow? (I noticed there was mention towards the bottom of the article about a short discovery call.)

All that to say:

* email/async communication is great

* meet your customers where they are

* docs are great and clear messaging pays off

* devtools at a certain price point ($50/month vs $3k/month) deserve different go to market motions

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  • numbsafari 14 hours ago

    At least you offer a pricing calculator.

    When we are doing vendor research, we often dequeue or deprioritize vendors that do not have any kind of pricing available for the tier we require. Generally speaking, we assume things like volume discounts are available. Also, it's good to get a rough idea of what the delta between "Pro" and "Enterprise" happens to be. Not infrequently the reason that delta isn't available is because it's stupid orders of magnitude different.

    If we know that up front, we know not to waste our time tire kicking with a demo account.

    So, the middle ground you describes would seem, to me, to be the right place to be. Giving your pricing page a cursory glance, I would rank it pretty highly for the kind of "initial investigation" we might do.

    I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".

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    • mooreds 13 hours ago

      > I think from an entrepreneur standpoint, if I see a space with vendors with non-transparent pricing, I often think "there's an opportunity there".

      That makes a ton of sense. IMO, it means one of two things:

      * prices are so high because of the cost of goods sold or margins that they'll scare off anyone researching and therefore there might be an 80% solution that can be priced transparently and eat the market

      * the company is still exploring pricing and doesn't have a firm grasp on COGS; this means there is some kind of blue ocean opportunity

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ccppurcell a day ago

Also, this is very minor but phrases like "get on a call" or worse, references to jumping or hopping, really irritate me. What's wrong with that good old English verb "to have"? Or better yet, call is (believe it or not) a verb! Can I call you? Maybe. Can we hop on a quick call? Absolutely not.

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chefandy a day ago

I’ve had too many bad sales experiences to deal with that. The second someone tries to force me into a sales call for a non-customized or self-configurable service or product, I assume they’re just shamelessly setting me up to extract as much money from me as they possibly can. I just can’t assume good faith on the part of a company that only distributes product information through someone making a commission. It feels like they’re inviting me into a mouse trap.

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epolanski a day ago

I'm a freelancer and sometimes I have to recommend software or services for my clients.

When I evaluate choices I automatically remove all of those that don't have pricing up front as I have no time nor intention to do this. I don't think any company lost millions on me, but many lost tens of thousands.

API providers are the worst, but I kinda understand them.

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ArnoVW 17 hours ago

When evaluating and making purchasing decisions for my security department, I have the same dislike of this approach. And generally for me it is a red flag.

Not (just) because of price gauging, but also because generally it is indicative of a very young company. In many cases they do not want to give the price because they don't know the price; they're still finding out how much they can charge.

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BrandoElFollito 20 hours ago

When my team organizes calls or onsite mtgs with vendors, they always tell them to remove the first 10 slides because we are not interested in why security matters, how it changed over the last 20 years and how great the company is.

They repeat this a few times so that it is clear.

Least week I had a meeting which started with the above, I asked if they knew what we asked, they said yes but they this is very important.

So I stayed, and when the ended the 15 slides with the hi

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  • BrandoElFollito 16 hours ago

    (sorry, somehow the end vanished)

    Do when they ended the 15 slides with their history I left the room.

    I find out really annoying when a vendor knows better what we need to hear. But not all are like this, some start by saying that the first 10 slides were removed :)

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bdavbdav a day ago

I’d extend that to sales calls where they try to get you to bend your requirements to fit the mis-aligned product.

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_nhh a day ago

I wanted to hire a personal trainer who just couldnt coordinate a call with me and I asked him to send me the details per mail. They said they dont do emails so didnt choose them as it was to scammy for me

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vishnugupta a day ago

To add to those two, I need a working demo (in sandbox of course) of the product without which there's no way for me to validate to what extent your product meets my requirements. It doesn't matter how many screenshots, product explainers, videos you might have put up. Nothing comes close to a sandbox. Trial period is also fine.

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joemclarke a day ago

I’m a CTO as well and never get on these types of calls to get more details and pricing since they can be such a big waste of time. Someone else from our organization will get on the call instead and then give me the pricing details so we can make a decision.

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shin_lao a day ago

What's the most expensive software you bought?

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  • zoogeny a day ago

    lol, believe it or not this was an interview question one of my Director of Engineering used to use to sus out the experience of people. As I read the parent comment I was thinking the same thing.

    Be careful listening to this kind of advice. You never know what ballpark the "CTO" is playing in.

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    • shin_lao 14 hours ago

      I'm just thinking about 6 to 7 figures software investment and trying to understand how you could do that without several meetings.

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      • driverdan 7 hours ago

        Easy, use JIRA and give your whole company seats. Add on some other Atlassian products and you'll quickly get to 4-5 figures per month.

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brightball 17 hours ago

“Get on a call” is code for “we have commissioned sales people and in order to make that work we can’t let inbound leads from our website bypass them”

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sz4kerto a day ago

Are you me? I'm a CTO too, and I feel _exactly_ like this.

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ralusek 13 hours ago

I'm also a CTO frequently making product decisions, and I refer to it as "Boomer pricing." You want to get on a call with me to assess the size of my company and whether or not I have some bureaucratic, unconcerned entity with an indiscriminate pocketbook. Clear pricing up front, and ideally a pricing calculator, or I don't even consider it.

If I make a product, I don't want you to use it because you found me first and I happened to harangue you on a sales call. I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.

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  • ezekg 13 hours ago

    > I want you to find my product, compare it will full transparency to the other products, and go with mine if it best suits you. Anybody who behaves differently I immediately assume to be behaving in bad faith and is not actually confident in their product on its own merits.

    Totally agree. I think this why I hated the enterprise sales dance so much -- if somebody doesn't want to buy, I don't want to sell; if they don't know what they're buying, they probably aren't the type of customer I'm looking for i.e. likely to become a support burden.

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HideousKojima a day ago

>2. Know that the pricing is within the ballpark of reasonable given what your product does.

My goto line is "I can get a ballpark estimate for chucking 22 metric tons into low earth orbit, why can't I get a ballpark estimate for your boring enterprise software library licensing?" Links to SpaceX pricing help here.

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psyclobe a day ago

Case in point this dumpster fire of a product: aparavi.com

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that_guy_iain 12 hours ago

> There are numerous products I likely would have purchased, but I either find a substitute or just go without because I won't play the stupid "let's get on a call" game.

> I've rolled-my-own solution more than once as well when there were no other good competitors.

I don't want to be rude but this sounds like terrible business decisions. I would say this is a case of cutting your nose off to spite your face but I suspect it's not your money your wasting rolling-your-own solution. Like it normally costs a lot more in dev resources to build instead of buying. And it seems like your doing it because of your ego and your unwillingness to play stupid games.

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  • freedomben 9 hours ago

    That's a significant over-simplification and ends up wrong in many cases. Build vs. buy is largely the same equation as rent vs. own in real estate or automobiles. Generally speaking, in the short term renting is almost always cheaper, but there's a break-even point at which buying (aka building) becomes cheaper. Owning the system also grants considerable ability to build it to be exactly what you need, instead of hacking around deficiencies and/or begging your account manager to get your feature approved and implemented.

    There are plenty of situations in which the terrible business decision is to rent instead of build. The difficulty is that without knowing the future it's not always clear, so you have to use your best judgment and hope you get it right.

    Edit: Also don't forget that roll-your-own doesn't necessarily mean starting something from scratch. In many cases I opted to use and self-host an open source project that sometimes is sufficient all on its own, and when not we can make changes to it. I almost never start a non-trivial project from scratch just to avoid buying, unless it's a major piece of our product or value proposition in which case you have to consider the risk of building on a foundation you don't control.

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thrawa8387336 a day ago

TLDR; please don't call him, he really doesn't like calls. Must be a gen z

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throwaway98797 a day ago

your probably leaving money on the table then

i’d find that unacceptable as a ceo

you got to do the work to do what’s best for the company, not yourself

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  • TeMPOraL a day ago

    No, they're protecting money on their company's table from being taken by random sellers. "Let's get on a call" game seldom leads to better deals for the buyer.

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    • Moru a day ago

      I see it like this. If the seller can have salespeople waiting on a call, there can be better deals somewhere else. If the seller can have people cold-calling other companies, there most certainly is a better deal around that they don't want me to know about.

      Over the years I have developed a salescall aversion to the grade that I hang up as soon as I my unconciousness have detected one. It has gone so far that I have had to apologize to our salespeople calling me and I just hang up by reflex. Very awkward I tell you.

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      • TeMPOraL a day ago

        Who knows, maybe there is no better deal, maybe the cold-calling salesman is actually offering the very best deal there is on the market. Then again, maybe the Nigerian prince really needs help with their fortune, and I really just won a car for being the millionth visitor on that news site[0].

        Point being, some stranger is calling me and asking for my money. I don't know enough about them to give them money just because they say it's going to be worth it.

        --

        [0] - https://xkcd.com/570/

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  • blitzar 19 hours ago

    CTO's time is worth ~$10k a day, spending a day "on calls" to save $2.50 is unacceptable.

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  • mlyle a day ago

    But part of doing what's right is considering opportunity cost.

    If buying something would be a win for an org takes up too much organizational bandwidth because of how hard it is to procure, then it's not worth fiddling about trying to buy it.

    The org gains a whole bunch of time he's not wasting on useless calls.

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    • throwaway98797 a day ago

      when your purchasing 100k+ products having a conversation makes a lot of sense

      lots of opportunities to find easy win-win

      finding out what the salesmen incentives are and working with them can lead to a good outcome

      obviously not worth it for smaller ticket stuff

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      • mlyle a day ago

        There's a bazillion things we could be thinking about buying.

        Being able to serve yourself and figure out if there's any fit removes friction. Spending an hour on an initial sales call to find out that information isn't optimal.

        As he's said, when he's desperate, he will do more work. And he is willing to do calls when it makes sense, but expects them to be efficient and expects to be able to qualify the vendor.

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