You know, I'm a builder. I like to build things. But a business isn't about building things, it's about selling things. You can build a real business with a terrible to mediocre product if you are great at selling it. You can't build a real business if you can't sell your product, no matter how good your product is.<p>The thing that will determine your success is sales and marketing, especially early in the business life.
Whenever I see these slideshare links, I never get anything out of them. Without hearing the actual audio or text that goes along with the slides, they're not really useful to me. Anyone else have this issue?
Regarding the slide about Kathy Sierra, find a spare hour and <i>watch this video</i>:<p><a href="http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-the-minimum-badass-user-business-of-software-a-masterclass-in-thinking-about-software-product-development/" rel="nofollow">http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/kathy-sierra-building-...</a><p>Her talk alone justified every penny I spent going to BoS last year.
(This is not a flame or anything just my subjective impression. I know the people who built this (well 2 of them) personally. So forgive me guys)<p>I was asking a few times how things were going and that I could need something that sounds like what they were building -- granted on a very informal level but still I asked and expressed my interested.<p>Problem was: They never came back to me and told me: Hey here's the stuff! Wanna try?<p>I can make up reasons why, maybe because I moved to another country to take a job, or after all they don't like me or whatever. To me it boils down to: <i>I</i> (as in "the potential customer") was asking how far the product was and never got a real answer.<p>My team has about 2000 Boxes to "operate"[1] and I manage only a single team. Totaling to about 100K servers with different DCs spread over the world.<p>I'd think anybody who gets this kind of offer should try to get a foot in the door. Even if the deal doesn't close people have heard about the stuff.<p>So the essence is to me: This one little slide where you see that sales/marketing was way under represented in the team. Hell guys I know! you can build stuff, but don't expect me (the customer) to keep asking and asking and asking for wether or not it suits you to send me something I can work with...<p>[1]: I currently live in an enterprise environment where DevOps or agile is still something new and not to be trusted!
Here is my take after reading the slides from a student perspective. If we put more resource on marketing would it mean at some point we will oversell our service? In other words, we can only handle 100 users but now 120 users because of the good marketing? Then we have to hire more people (but that takes time too) to make the system more robust (from both deops and software engineering). That's a problem, isn't it?<p>Would it be okay to say a startup should have a good estimate of how many users they can handle at each cycle?