Acquiring new customers would become quite difficult, though. If you increase pr...

alephnerd · on May 23, 2024

All prospects are not the same.

You have 5 types of accounts:

- Strategic: F500s or very well known startups

- Enterprise: F1000s

- Mid-Market: Companies below $1B a year in revenue

- Federal: Federal Government

- Channel/Reseller: For companies that are too small, you have a MSP sell for you because you can't be bothered to sell to them.

Strategics, Enterprises, and Fed will always get good deals and will always have protracted conversations, as these are accounts spending 7-9 figures.

Mid-market and below will always have a bad time because they ain't spending enough.

We're businesses, not your friends. We'll try to help, but at the end of the day, we want to get paid as well.

markus_zhang · on May 23, 2024

Makes sense. Does that mean there is a bigger market for mid-market and below now? Maybe it is too annoying for the big companies to care, but could be lucrative for smaller ones.

alephnerd · on May 23, 2024

> Does that mean there is a bigger market for mid-market and below now

Nope. Tech forward mid-markets (eg. every single tech startup) are all cloud first, and the legacy mid-markets will go thru MSPs and Resellers to buy these products.

No one likes IT spend. It's a cost center.

markus_zhang · on May 23, 2024

Gotcha, thank you. Yeah, no one likes a cost center...and IT is usually the first to layoff.

AtlasBarfed · on May 23, 2024

Problem is, you are opening up the market for open source competitors by not servicing the mid market.

Customer service is becoming truly extinct.

alephnerd · on May 23, 2024

> Problem is, you are opening up the market for open source competitors by not servicing the mid market.

You aren't. They go to resellers or other large vendors (eg. this example of going from VMWare to Nutanix)

Open Source competitors (NOT open core companies) do not provide the SLAs on support needed if SHTF.