You’re a little company, now act like one (2009)

Everyone should be focused on the shared goal of the startup being successful.

What you're working on is triaged constantly, with everyone contributing what they can, learning as necessary.

Everybody wins, or everybody loses. And if you don't work together as a team, it's probably the latter.

(These are not just empty platitudes. For example, when I say everybody wins, that means I expect everyone to have meaningful equity shares -- not a successful exit makes the founders filthy rich, while everyone else gets a small consolation prize for contributing.)

Behind the anecdote, there were unusual and complicated reasons that someone felt and did some things as they did. I tried to carve out a standalone piece for HN, without getting into the more sensitive and irrelevant stuff.

If you don't value your developers perspective in the sales cycle, you are fundamentally doing something wrong. Developer's don't necessarily hold more product knowledge than anyone else, but they sure as shit can tell you how your company can make an extra 100k on a sale by just adding 10 more lines of code.

Sales are incentivized to sell, developers are incentivized to provide impact. Include them.

I can say, from experience:

1. Everything gets better the more technical people are involved with customers. Sales, biz dev, tech supp, trade shows, etc. Probably not as the point person, probably not solo, but mosdef involved. And not every tech has the aptitude, or desire, to be customer facing. YMMV. Still, conversations are shorter, more productive. Customers respond very well. It's been a huge win-win, every time.

2. It's always been hard to convince (commission driven) sales people to loop in techs. It's two separate cultures. eg Upon success, sales person gets a new Porsche and the tech gets more work. Which causes resentment. I don't begrudge high rewards for sales (it's a tough gig). But some perks for the grunts would be nice too. Just saying.

"Garageware" is what we called that type of software. Because it truly was, often built using old protocols, outmoded security mindset, etc.

It did the job our staff required (and may have been the only piece of software to do so) but it wasn't our favorite to deal with from a technology perspective.

Our super-lucky big first customer, it probably helped that we spun out of an established small engineering firm that did notable R&D work for huge companies, and also that we partnered with a huge hardware tech company, who had an evangelist who put in a good word for us at times.

And after a successful launch for a prestigious big company, we could point to that, to increase our credibility with other big companies (especially those in the same and similar markets).

For some co-design work leading to pilot we landed (intending to lead to a pilot), we worked together with their in-house product design team, on big brand-involved technology changes to their non-computers-tech advanced products, and also planned out the manufacturing and distribution logistics integration. (I think this one probably would've gotten to a pilot, after some delays, but we'd stretched our runway until it snapped, and there were various reasons we didn't get a bridge and didn't raise.)

For some prospects, we got access to CEOs or other execs, and the message came downwards to work with us. (Which seemed to nevertheless often have people below thinking in the usual CYA ways. But our foot was in the door, and our size had at least a provisional OK. Though some of those devolved into too many stakeholders being roped into meetings, which meant more use cases to be satisfied, including by people who were half-hearted about it, and this probably wasn't on their KPIs.)

Other prospects included smaller companies in some categories (e.g., a founder grew a sustainable business designing and making a high-quality physical luxury product). I think those were probably fine with us being small, and that they liked the direct access and our willingness to work with them and adapt to what they needed. The challenge there might've been finding PMF with a customer who understood every aspect of their company, who feels every dollar, and who didn't get where they are by introducing costs and complexity they weren't sure they had to. (By contrast with large companies as customers, anyone who's had to use some of the products of enterprise SaaS purchases knows that large companies aren't always that discerning in what they spend money on or what complexity they introduce.)

Bigger companies were also easier for one of our sales tactics, because their products had the popularity and volume to show up significantly in some bespoke data acquisition stuff from osint that we developed, which we used to prepare reports for cold call prospects that showed a money-losing problem they had, which maybe they didn't know about.

Not saying it wasn't right to actually build the app, but you could have sidestepped the issue if that wasn't the priority