> I love that the post points out the importance of selling to executives instead of users. As much as users hate most of their tools, they have very little say on what gets bought. Executives make those decisions and no amount of grousing or changing from internal users will change that.

It's possible to "sell" directly to users, but you have to have a particular pricing structure: free to individuals.

This is what TravisCI, Dropbox and Slack did.

You actually have to have a really good product to pull this off, though.