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No Calls

(keygen.sh)
1603 points ezekg | 1 comments | 16 Jan 25 14:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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Eridrus ◴[16 Jan 25 15:47 UTC] No.42726831[source]▶
This only works if your sales strategy is all about inbound sales, i.e. content marketing (like this article)/ads.

But if you're an enterprise b2b company and want to grow quickly rather than taking 8 years to go beyond 1 solopreneur like this guy you're going to want to do outbound sales.

It's also worth noting that this guys is mostly doing small deals. The literal largest price he has on his pricing page is 72k/yr, which isn't tiny, but his typical deal size is likely much smaller, so it makes total sense for him not to get on a call for $49/month, because that is not a scalable strategy.

But many enterprise b2b companies have a more complicated product than Keygen and charge orders of magnitude more than they do.

Which is not to say that he is wrong, it's just that this is the correct strategy for scaling a low ACV product, rather than a high ACV product. And a low ACV product has to have much broader demand.

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cainxinth ◴[16 Jan 25 16:22 UTC] No.42727363[source]▶
It also only works if your product is quite good. I think we can assume a fairly normal distribution for the quality of products where the vast majority are neither very good or bad. An average company with average products will be more inclined to try aggressive sales and marketing tactics because they don't have a great product to help motivate sales.
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1. consteval ◴[19 Jan 25 20:46 UTC] No.42761625[source]▶
I disagree, almost all products are intentionally bad and only continue to get worse. Ironically, it's due to the free market.

There's too much competition in virtually all product spaces and so these products have to compete on price. The idealized free market philosophy is that consumers will buy higher quality products, but they don't, they almost always buy cheaper products. Any "quality" improvement is therefore used to make the product cheaper, not better. For example, if you design a new material that's 20% stronger then your product does not become 20% stronger, rather you use 20% less material.

But even that is just a break even approach, which doesn't actually work for very long. Your competitors are actively cutting quality, so if you're just breaking even then you're on your way out. So why don't customers buy from you?

Because of the limitations of humans. Humans can't perceive small differences and humans are forgetful. It's safe to cut quality by, say, 1% every year forever. Nobody notices from point A to B, and then by the time they're comparing Z to A they don't really remember A.

There exists a short period of time, perhaps a couple decades maximum, where a product category is getting better and higher quality. From then on until the absolute end of that product, they can only get worse in quality. The exception is products that are exempt from the free market for one reason or another.