[mindcrime]

If you ask an enterprise vendor if their software has feature X, the answer is always, "Yes!"

FWIW, not all enterprise software vendors do that. We don't, for example.

Just last night I was running through a demo for a prospective customer, and my contact asked about some new features. The answer was "we have some of that partially implemented, another is trivial, and another one is going to take some research. Ballpark estimate is probably 6 weeks or so to do all that".

Of course maybe it's different when you're a founder who has spent his entire career as a developer and got sick of that exact bullshit routine. :-)

[Bartweiss]

> who has spent his entire career as a developer

If I'm right, this means you're selling to software companies, or companies doing in-house development?

As much bullshit as there is in selling software to software companies, it seems to be so much worse outside of this. Enterprise vendors selling to non-technical firms seem far more willing to promise the moon and stars on the basis that they can hand-wave it as "a job for the software guys". Whereas I think most devs hear that claim and translate to "six months of work", opening up a bit more room to do business by being honest. Congrats on not taking the common approach!

[mindcrime]

If I'm right, this means you're selling to software companies, or companies doing in-house development?

Not really. We're not doing developer tools or anything like that. Well.. not like an IDE or anything. The products we're talking to this prospect about are an Enterprise Social Network product and a Document Management product.

That said, we do have a machine learning /cognitive services platform in development, so that's borderline a "developer tool", but we're not in the same space as like an Atlassian or anything.

[mcguire]

"... another one is going to take some research. Ballpark estimate is probably 6 weeks or so to do all that."

One of these things is not like the other.

[mindcrime]

"some" research. Not talking "fundamental research" stuff (like particle physics) here. Just looking at the API's provided by a 3rd party product to see how the integration would work.

That said, I did change that answer to "more like 8 weeks" after we spoke further. And that was still just a rough estimate. Anyway, regardless of how accurate that is, the point is that we don't do the "anything can be done in two weeks" thing. :-)

[mcguire]

I've been burned far too many times by tasks that started as, "glue this API to that API", only to discover that "that API" anything remotely like what I needed.

[mindcrime]

I hear ya. Same here.

[pryelluw]

Did you close the sale? (Not being an ass. Curious)

[mindcrime]

Not yet. The conversation is ongoing though.