I experienced exactly the same story in the startup I worked for. Selling software to big enterprises is a kind of science: finding the right people to talk to, circumvent the irrelevant people that steal your time, addressing the problem you solve in the right manner, expect a contract to bounce until you have the money on the bank, ...
You call it a science but I think its more of an art. Enterprise sales requires experienced sales staff... I wonder how many young scrappy technology driven start ups have failed for this reason.
I know that I never hear good things about the enterprise software from successful enterprise companies, so it seems like the technology is not the deciding factory of company success. I almost wonder if a company that is too technology focused is at a competitive disadvantage.
I've seen enterprise software companies with a barely-graduated team of phone sales people kick ass, FWIW. Totally depends on the complexity of the product and whether there is a services component.
I think it depends. In general, I think selling services is strangely easier than selling just a product. Products often represent "work" - the buyer has to learn about the product, sell it to their team, etc. If you basically say, "we're going to hold your hand at $125/hr every step of the way", it can make the sale easier.
Middle manager buyers don't care much about profit. They care about stuff that allows them to work less or look smarter/better/more capable to their peers.
What's unfortunate is that these particular experiences repeat themselves so often.
Like most technical founders, I don't like selling stuff (I'm much rather crank out code), but as it turns out, that's an awfully important thing to do.
at the time delicous came out I wasn't aware of any other competing products. i also thought about a web based bookmarking service before delicious, but i never would have thought about the sharing and tagging links aspect. did someone release a similar product earlier?
I can't work out if you're being sarcastic or not. I think tagging has probably been in use in various places for a few hundred years if not thousands.
'Wrong business model' is the right answer here, it encapsulates: Market not ready for idea, focus on technology (trying to make something useful), selling nothingX3.
- "We got out marketed." Seems people are happier with this then we got out-invented. I'm not sure exactly why. There seem to be a lot more companies out there that say they got out-marketed then likely. Actually, I don't even really know what that means.
