Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I've got two nitpicks.

1. Know Your Company is, at minimum, a $2500 service. The amount of time you can spend with a given customer is huge, in that respect, because the customer support you're doing for that one customer is proportionally much more valuable. If I have a SaaS offering billing out at $20/mo., how much time can I feasibly spend with a customer (of which there are multitudes) before I have to think of ways to avoid timesinks?

2. The "manually adding people to a database" thing seems contrived. It's valuable because you learn the departments and the employees: so what's wrong with automating the excel/email uploads and having the script spit out an org chart and dossier to the printer? (That isn't a rhetorical question -- wouldn't a birds-eye view of an organization be more helpful?)

(Overall, I absolutely agree with Jason's point! But I think the argument is a bit more nuanced than the way he presents it.)

1. This is part of the point. Maybe $20/month isn't the right model. Maybe there's a different model you can consider where you'd have fewer customers, but those customers would be at a much higher price point. Who knows. Point is, it's your call and it's all possible depending on how you approach it.

2. Importing the spreadsheet of customer names will likely be one of the first things we automate. It's less insightful than the other things on the list, but I still believe doing it manually is teaching us something right now.

"Maybe $20/month isn't the right model. Maybe there's a different model you can consider where you'd have fewer customers, but those customers would be at a much higher price point."

Another model to consider would be to have different private label companies (that you control) serving up essentially the same product, priced differently, and offered through a different company name.

For example you have basecamp where you can manage unlimited projects at $3000 per year.

But it's possible that Boeing might pay $50,000 per year if they got even a higher level of service and a personal account manager. [1]

Now you could do this by adding a tier to basecamp but you could also be your own competition with basecamp just for the bespoke offering.

Figures arbitrary to make a point.

[1] Sold by a professional sales force or some other higher cost method than adwords.

For example I'm helping to investigate, as a favor, solutions for Physician scheduling. I'm amazed at how cheap the service is. I know that the group that wants this would easily pay much more to solve the problem in a turnkey fashion. But the current offerings are being sold on price only as a way to get attention. (And not doing a good job at it for that matter.)

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