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No Calls

(keygen.sh)
1603 points ezekg | 4 comments | 16 Jan 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.714s | source
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focusedone ◴[16 Jan 25 15:16 UTC] No.42726381[source]▶
Dear goodness will any other companies trying to sell to the company I work at please adopt this strategy. Please explain clearly what your product does, how you handle security, and what the enterprise license costs on the homepage.

Please do not harass us with calls and perpetual emails asking to schedule calls. If a call is what it takes to answer basic security and pricing questions, I loathe your company name before we've spoken and am very interested in doing business with anyone who *does* post that stuff online.

I do not understand why that's difficult, but it must be.

I wish I could use what this guy is selling.

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RobinL ◴[16 Jan 25 17:39 UTC] No.42728337[source]▶
Schedule a call is a huge red flag to me because:

- it implies differential pricing, meaning they will charge you as much as possible both now and in the future (when you may be locked in)

- it usually obscures what the product actually does

Differential pricing is really pernicious because if the product happens to be super valuable to you, they're likely to find out and charge you even more

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1. tashian ◴[16 Jan 25 17:59 UTC] No.42728575[source]▶
How should a company figure out what to charge for something in the first place? Especially a startup that doesn't have much market data to go on, and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of. When this is the case, one option is to do price discovery. And the way to do that is to remove prices from the website, take calls, learn about customers and their needs, and experiment.
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2. earnestinger ◴[16 Jan 25 18:27 UTC] No.42728950[source]▶
If client pays for a link that’s part of a chain, and doesn’t want the chain broken, and still has profit, it means client can pay more, that link is worth more.
3. necovek ◴[16 Jan 25 20:29 UTC] No.42730487[source]▶
When you don't how valuable it's going to be, you at least know how expensive is it to make.

For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top.

If you can't figure that out either, well...

4. TeMPOraL ◴[16 Jan 25 21:09 UTC] No.42730945[source]▶
> and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of.

How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with.

--

[0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.