> The infrastructure used to run our Salesforce instance probably costs somewhere on the order of $100 per month. Yet, they charge us tens of thousands of dollars per month… how?
Not really. Unless the subscription is in tens of hundreds, that benefit-of-volume is not possible. Even more so when the solution involves bleeding edge stuff (AI/ML/real-time analytics etc). Easy to say, very very very hard to even achieve decent margins on such infrastructural cost. It's always a tradeoff between { feature-richness, time-to-market } and cost-efficient SaaS. Only the players who got a solid customer base would ever get to enjoy that privilege.
> Though it’s far down in the acronym, the identified pain is really where you should start with the customer. You should be able to answer in great detail why their life is currently painful, and how they handle the problems you solve today.
There's a slippery slope. Any "solution" won't help, in the era of "disruptive solutions". During the initial stages of industrial revolution, cities were scared of all the horseshit they thought they'd have to deal with. A 'con'sultant would've typically come up with an efficient way to dispose off all that manure into the sea. Only a mad scientist working on an automobile somewhere ended up solving that poop of a problem really. And in hindsight, every mildly lucky person would consider themselves "disruptive" without actually having to be one though. Such is our world! :D
[edit] just noticed that all comments in this thread that are critical of the narrative are voted down. one is fine, all of them?
The author was talking about the marginal cost of Salesforce running their instance. If they stopped being a customer, it would save Salesforce $100 in server costs, but Salesforce would lose $10k’s. That means, Salesforce needs to deliver that much value to the customer in order to keep them. In addition, they need to deliver that much value over any lower cost competitors.
Not really. Unless the subscription is in tens of hundreds, that benefit-of-volume is not possible. Even more so when the solution involves bleeding edge stuff (AI/ML/real-time analytics etc). Easy to say, very very very hard to even achieve decent margins on such infrastructural cost. It's always a tradeoff between { feature-richness, time-to-market } and cost-efficient SaaS. Only the players who got a solid customer base would ever get to enjoy that privilege.
> Though it’s far down in the acronym, the identified pain is really where you should start with the customer. You should be able to answer in great detail why their life is currently painful, and how they handle the problems you solve today.
There's a slippery slope. Any "solution" won't help, in the era of "disruptive solutions". During the initial stages of industrial revolution, cities were scared of all the horseshit they thought they'd have to deal with. A 'con'sultant would've typically come up with an efficient way to dispose off all that manure into the sea. Only a mad scientist working on an automobile somewhere ended up solving that poop of a problem really. And in hindsight, every mildly lucky person would consider themselves "disruptive" without actually having to be one though. Such is our world! :D
[edit] just noticed that all comments in this thread that are critical of the narrative are voted down. one is fine, all of them?