BC TECH
Saved by @zmbnski

Most software founders, particularly in B2B, need to get radically better at sales. @Steli , who is the best person for explaining the scrappy stages in the beginning and then building out a team with scripts and processes, wrote a guide to:

 For technical founders it is irrationally, obscenely hard to reverse years of programming (ba dum bum) that sales is a value-destroying activity. Sales is CLEARLY a value-creating activity, contingent on you have a value-creating product.
The world will not drop what they are doing to adopt your work. This is particularly true in B2B, where simply building a better mousetrap won't overcome the activation energy required to get people with additional non-mice problems to prioritize changing mousetraps today.
This is very non-obvious for founders because founders are not often people who *want* to be sold to. We often come from a background where trying out tools is a bit of a fun hobby. We like looking at all the options, making charts, and ripping out partially complete tests.
"This week I unsuccessfully trialed four software options for automating that thing that has been killing us. Our actual production process remains the same as last week. Don't worry; this was a great use of time." is not a thing you want to write in a progress report to manager.
The process of sales pushes the burden for understanding the market and distilling it from the customer to the sales person. That is a very valuable thing; it is why almost all businesses buy almost all of their big-ticket purchases (including e.g. employees) from sales.
(A candidate is absolutely doing a sales job when attempting to get hired by a company. This is one of the things that both sides of that market are frequently in denial about, but I digress.)
Simply getting oneself to be comfortable with sales (or at least present as being comfortable for a phone call or two) unlocks a crazy amount of success for founders, because founders have a few advantages over every other sales rep.
One is that they present as being almost irrationally obsessed with the market. Founders tend to live and breath the product for a few years, and it often shows, mostly in positive ways.

Unlike most sales reps, founders can credibly promise tight feedback loops for product.
Stealing a line from @asmartbear which has paid for at least a year or two of my kids' education:

"If you go with BigCo, you can call them at 3 AM. Someone will listen to you politely, explain they have no solution, and open a ticket. If you call at 3 PM, same answer."
"You can't get a useless answer from me at 3 AM in the morning. But when I'm up, your business *really is* important to me. I am the engineering team. I will push fixes so fast you will be amazed. I *will* get this right because it *actually matters* to my business that I do."
Founders have to sell.

Many, many technical founders of my acquaintance want to offload this to someone ASAP. I've never seen this work: you need to have a deep understanding of your market and customers to arm that first non-founder salesperson. It is gained by doing.
(And even if you don't do sales day-to-day anymore, you still have to sell candidates, investors, and partners on the desirability of using your company. Though most B2B SaaS CEOs that I know still very much have an account in their CRM and talk to "opportunities" frequently.)
The transition from founder-driven sales to founder-assisted sales generally starts with hiring a "maverick" sort of salesperson; someone who is comfortable extracting what you know about the market, iterating rapidly on scripts, and doing "things that don't scale" to win.
This may often be a necessary step, but it generally doesn't last for growing companies, partly because there is a crushing market undersupply of very effective mavericks.

These folks are capable of writing their own ticket and then, by construction, getting folks to buy it.
So eventually one tends to hire a VP of Sales who has done this before. They'll immediately start hiring reps under them, and start systematizing what you've learned about sales into scripts and playbooks.
You'll see this maturity model start to creep into all parts of the funnel, too, which will probably actually be written down for the first time somewhere around this stage.

Sophisticated, mature processes for marketing to pass leads over to sales for qualification.
Sophisticated, maturing processes for sales to actually physically close deals. ("What, you mean we don't just edit a few things in Word and then ask them to print, sign, scan, and send back?") Defined, scheduled startup calls, onboarding, and handover to AMs / CS aftewards.
(Sales, like many professions, benefits from specialization of labor. One that happens early is splitting the team into "account executives" (AEs) focused on getting new accounts and "account managers" (AMs), focused on keeping existing customers happy and expansion revenue.
(Some companies even split their AM teams into dedicated subteams for doing true expansion, for cross-selling products, for winning renewals, and for the generic "I want the direct contact information for someone at your company because our business must be important enough" job)
If you're at all interested in these topics, the people to read a heck out of are Steli and @jasonlk (who writes https://t.co/7FpEMvXdLZ ).

Steli is so effective at sales he has closed deals he wasn't even a party to. My favorite anecdote about this:
At a previous company I had invited myself out to lunch with a software CEO, with intent to get them to sign up, but was not really sure where we were at end of lunch.

"Hey apropos of nothing: do you know Steli?"
"Oh yeah he's great."
"He is. Steli wouldn't let me leave lunch...
... until you explicitly tell me you're going to use our product."
"He wouldn't, would he."
"He wouldn't."
"OK then; we will."
"Great! Email me and we'll figure out logistics."
That is called "asking for the sale" and, while that is a very unconventional way to ask for the sale, a *ridiculous* portion of all energy expended in the art of sales is to get conversations to the point where someone has to actually say yes or no.
Relatedly: in the highly likely event that you get an answer which is not a yes or no, effective salespeople follow up until the sun goes nova waiting for either a yes or no.

More from Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
If an employer is willing to be abusive to you prior to hiring you, when you have maximum leverage and they are maximally incentivized to play nice, I think that gives you *extremely actionable* signal as to how they'll treat you when you're working there and dependent on them.

For candidates: evaluate prospective employers accordingly.

For startups employing e.g. engineers: given that your candidates should evaluate you accordingly, be *extra special* careful to operate like professionals with regards to e.g. interviewing, offers, and negotiation.

"Can you be more explicit about 'abusive' here?"

Not without violating a confidence, but as someone who has been on hiring side of table and is a capitalist, there are *clearly* things you could do which would be "sharp operating, but we're all sharp operators" in some contexts.

Hiring employees is often not one of those contexts. The nature of the relationship, the asymmetry in power, and the social contract strongly counsel you to be a lot better there than you are minimally required by law / contract.

A thing which aesthetically frustrates me is that a lot of the things I've heard companies do here serve *no legitimate business purpose.* In some cases it's getting tens of dollars of advantage. TENS! On an engineering candidate!
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?”
Me: Write a million words.
Follow up: “Hah but seriously.”
Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million.
Follow up: “No seriously.”
Me: Nobody expects 10 Quick Tips To Play Violin At Carnegie Hall.

The Internet is so much better at teaching writing than the traditional educational system principally because it removes an artificial and limiting constraint on output imposed by ability of gatekeepers’ limited time to evaluate output.

(Interestingly in fields where we actually care about performance we’re good at encouraging students to practice when no one is watching but for writing we basically assume all the value is created by the teacher-minute of attention. Teacher-minutes are scarce and rationed.)

If you ever want to be deeply, deeply disillusioned about the state of the world, compare what we do where we care about output quality and what we do where we don’t, and which domains sort into which column by revealed preference.
WRITING
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.
TECH
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
There are a *lot* of software shops in the world that would far rather have one more technical dependency than they'd like to pay for one of their 20 engineers to become the company's SPOF expert on the joys of e.g. HTTP file uploads, CSV parsing bugs, PDF generation, etc.


Every year at MicroConf I get surprised-not-surprised by the number of people I meet who are running "Does one thing reasonably well, ranks well for it, pulls down a full-time dev salary" out of a fun side project which obviates a frequent 1~5 engineer-day sprint horizontally.

"Who is the prototypical client here?"

A consulting shop delivering a $X00k engagement for an internal system, a SaaS company doing something custom for a large client or internally facing or deeply non-core to their business, etc.

(I feel like many of these businesses are good answers to the "how would you monetize OSS to make it sustainable?" fashion, since they often wrap a core OSS offering in the assorted infrastructure which makes it easily consumable.)

"But don't the customers get subscription fatigue?"

I think subscription fatigue is far more reported by people who are embarrassed to charge money for software than it is experienced by for-profit businesses, who don't seem to have gotten pay-biweekly-for-services fatigue.
STARTUPS
Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)
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foone
foone
@Foone
you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I
TECH
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Cookie Cyboid
Cookie Cyboid
@CookieCyboid
“Why are Tumblr and Facebook cracking down on sex so much? And why is Facebook in so over zealous about it? It’s all Apples fault!” Etc etc

I can explain all. It is largely the fault of a set of US laws called SESTA and FOSTA.
TECH
James Felton
James Felton
@JimMFelton
Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ


For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.


Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.
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Ameya
Ameya
@Finstor85
After getting good feedback on yesterday's thread on #routemobile I think it is logical to do a bit in-depth technical study. Place #twilio at center, keep #routemobile & #tanla at the periphery & see who is each placed.


This thread is inspired by one of the articles I read on the-ken about #postman API & how they are transforming & expediting software product delivery & consumption, leading to enhanced developer productivity.

We all know that #Twilio offers host of APIs that can be readily used for faster integration by anyone who wants to have communication capabilities. Before we move ahead, let's get a few things cleared out.

Can anyone build the programming capability to process payments or communication capabilities? Yes, but will they, the answer is NO. Companies prefer to consume APIs offered by likes of #Stripe #twilio #Shopify #razorpay etc.

This offers two benefits - faster time to market, of course that means no need to re-invent the wheel + not worrying of compliance around payment process or communication regulations. This makes entire ecosystem extremely agile
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