> you sell a product where it's easy to determine the cost for one user signing up by themselves, so you figure out the required markup and publish that on your site.

Then someone at a large organization can multiply this number by the expected number of licenses they'll need, and get a ballpark estimate for the (upper bound of the) costs of the service, which is a critical input in determining whether it's even worthwhile to consider talking to the vendor. Having that information, the organization can then schedule a call to negotiate whatever extra adaptations and discounts they need, or realize signing up is unlikely to have positive ROI and skip it, which also saves the seller from wasting their time on a deal that won't come through.

Vendors that hide critical information and pricing behind a phone call are eating the risk of having their time wasted on negotiating deals that would never succeed, trading it for a chance to scam some clueless or loss-insensitive companies for some big money.

> The selling company needs to know if its worth the effort

It's not worth the effort.

It's killing your ability to scale your sales process. Unique adaptations kill your ability to scale product development, as now you have a bunch of one off deployments. Figure out ahead of time what discounts you want for various tiers of user count.

If you are a startup, avoiding things that don't let you scale are critical.

you are right. an enterprise products can never be ready for any enterprise customer. they need custom solutions to work with what they already invested millions in. each customer is different there. most enterprise products are ever expanding 'app platforms' or frameworks ultimately, in order to be able to adapt to new customer environments and needs quickly and efficiently. if they arent, most environments will spit them out quickly and harshly. bad for business on either side.

Totally OT, but I love your typo "a la cart". It makes me think of an early 20th century greengrocer with a cart of vegetables and fruit trying to appear more sophisticated by saying he's selling things "a la cart".

> and may be making something entirely new that no one quite knows the value of.

How many such companies even exist at any given point in time? In software in particular, that's going to be almost none, and those few that are, won't be that for long. For everyone else, there are already competitors doing the same thing, and even more competitors solving the same problem in a different way[0], giving you data points for roughly what prices make sense. Between that and your costs being the lower bound, you almost certainly have something to work with.

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[0] - There's no "someone has to be the first" bootstrap paradox here. Even if you're lucky enough to genuinely be the first to market with something substantially new, it still is just an increment on some existing solution, and solves a variant of some existing problem, so there is data to go on.

When you don't how valuable it's going to be, you at least know how expensive is it to make.

For a company wanting to make a profit, you need to cover your costs, so that's a minimum, with some reasonable profit on top.

If you can't figure that out either, well...

If client pays for a link that’s part of a chain, and doesn’t want the chain broken, and still has profit, it means client can pay more, that link is worth more.

> a provider is trying to align their pricing with the value it creates with solving your problem.

That's just an euphemism for "a provider is trying to capture for themselves all the value their product creates for you".

A real head scratcher. Perhaps has something to do with there being no point of buying if all (or even most) of the value flows back to the seller? Unless you're a nail wholesaler and are happy with 0.1% margins because you sell by truckloads anyway.

I could see that — having worked for a large network vendor in the past, there are some things that just don't lend themselves to any kind of pricing without some kind of scoping discussion. :)

Much like cloud users with k8s, though, I think a lot more companies think they have that problem than actually have that problem.

Sales has to be commission based and you always hire at least two salesman.

The biggest driver to make a sale is the commission. The second biggest is fear of getting sacked because you’re not making as many sales as the other guy.

GP's company is (at least in their eyes) not interested in selling per se - quoting:

>> That means the sales person as they're working is not incentivized to sell as much as possible, they're incentivized to figure out the (potential) client's needs, and how we can best meet them, irrespective of what they end up paying.

I don't know what the name for that other thing is, but it's indeed distinct from "selling" that salespeople do, which boils down to begging, cajoling, tricking or coercing you to buy their shit, no matter how useless or downright harmful to you is, because that's what commissions combined with competition incentivize. Not surprisingly, the bottom-feeder telemarketing sweatshops are where this model is present in its purest form - extreme competition, frequent bonuses for top performers, and quick firing for not being a top performer.

If I have a choice, I never want to "buy" whatever someone's "selling" - I only want to do the whatever is the "buying" equivalent for the not-selling thing I don't have the name for.

It's not a B2B-specific phenomenon either. The B2C equivalent of those salespeople are car salesmen (which have meme status at this point), telemarketers, and those people doing the Amway model, trying to sell some Tupperware knockoffs[0] or barely working vacuum cleaners or whatnot at 3-10x inflated prices, making you feel like you had a good time instead of having just been scammed.

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[0] - Ironically, Tupperware was also sold in this model, but it at least wasn't shit.

> Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.

To me, it's refusing to show up with a knife to a gun fight. The company needs a thing. The "things person" stands no chance in direct confrontation with a "people's person" and they know it, so they to avoid calls (direct or otherwise) to level the playing field. A "people's person" could fare much better against the seller's "people's persons", but then a "people's person" is in much worse position to understand the thing the company needs in the first place.

For buying things, a win-win outcome can occur only when people on both both buyer and seller side are "things persons".

It's basically a Prisoner's dilemma, with "people's person" and "things person" in place of "defect" and "cooperate".

> Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in

Except as we can see in this thread, it's not objective fact. They chase many customers away with such tactics and are blissfully unaware.

> Lots of potential customers are clueless but excited and in order to book large contracts, you need someone to be a steward to work the contract through the byzantine maze of leadership and procurement.

That's called exploitation, not stewardship.

It is what it is, but let's not pretend that the relationship here is anything but adversarial. The incentives are such that dishonesty and malice brings in more sales, so honest salespeople get quickly outcompeted by their dishonest co-workers, and companies with honest business models get outcompeted by those with dishonest ones. Buyers are in no position to change this, but that doesn't mean they have to pretend it's fine, or play along.

It seems reasonably clear to me, yes - although "distribution" could mean a lot of things.

As the documentation is all public, though, it's easy enough to see what they're offering.

>> "The gen-z ultra-wide fonts didn't help with readability either."

The font is "Owners XXWide" and the font designer's various mentions in publications suggest Elder Millennial at the latest. I don't think we can blame the kids for this one.

Right, I thought it was extremely clear. The code sample on the homepage really makes it click right away for developers and confirm that it's what they need. While developers might not be the decision person, I bet they get a ton of leads from developers who find this company and then ask their management for it.

Did you find ChatGPT responses accurate for queries like this?

> Especially for consulting firms, they really try to differentiate themselves from competitors by obfuscating what they actually do.

I mean, isn't that what Zombocom was created for? I always assumed it existed to parody those firms.

You can do anything at Zombocom[tm].

sure, features vs benefits

reminiscent of TV ads selling fantasies of complete happiness and ultimate dream lifestyle, all kinds of beautiful imagery and moving music... and the ad ends, and still no idea what the product is or how it's differentiated.

This is the worst, especially when it's a library! Like, show me the code!

This might be the very reason they prefer to call you, to force you into rushed decisions. Because otherwise I can't imagine the reason for spending scheduling time and minutes (hours) of chitchat just to answer a couple of very basic and totally repeatable question.

They're maybe the same managers who love the RTO for the sake of RTO.

I agree about everything you wrote except the misunderstandings. Written communication absolutely can and do give rise to misunderstandings.

I just sent this article to an enterprise sales rep who has been email me for weekly days for the last several weeks, even thought I told them I was no interested and away on vacation.

> The economy is built on grifting, at this point

I agreed until here. Obviously, lying isn't the only way to make money. I make furniture and fix windows in old houses for a living. Am I grifting?

When you stretch into hyperbole, you lose the ability to convince people in the middle.

> That last point is especially funny considering how startups lie, too, like having a landing page and no product but collecting emails like you do.

How dare companies do market research with potential buyers to know what to build before they start building it! If only we could setup massive factories that pump out hot garbage that nobody wants and build roads to nowhere like the soviets did.

"...like you do" Is this a typo or a personal attack to the parent?

VC is an absolute cancer. All of these grifters claim to love free markets, but the entire ecosystem is just propping up companies operating at a loss until all their competitors fold. At least these useless buzzword B2B companies actually have some gormless entity willing to pay them enough to keep the lights on without another 500 million dollar check from Daddy Andreessen lol

A crucial point that is lost on this venture capital-funded forum: scummy garbage makes money.

I don't think you quite understand how VC works.