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by john_saptra 53 days ago
1. Strong hierarchical structure is prevalent in that team, so, you'll have to bide your time (amicably), if you've to been taken seriously.

2. Expectation from you is to raise PR until you 'know' how it's done. By showing up from bigtech and by suggesting solutions, you are basically telling them you've seen it done better, and that's a bitter pill to swallow.

3. The startup has been around for 10 years, and tech changes fast; things might have been built rapidly and to a paying customer's corner case, and now the product looks terrible from an external observer's perspective.

4. Even bigtech products evolve into terrible things and nobody has time to go fix on a haunch from someone, however insightful it is. If you claim to have tech skills, why not come up with metrics to prove your point and how much money it can save or bring in.

5. You can't convince people from your pedigree, but from your insights AND backing it with data (latency, resource usage ==> revenue).

6. Startups don't have money laying around so if features don't have $$$ printed on them, they get canned.

good luck!

1 comments

Is 10 years still a startup? Serious question, not trying to troll.
They describe themselves as an "established startup" lol. It's just an industry-tailored CRM so it's a form-heavy application, nothing about it is ground breaking.

IMO if you're profitable and have been around longer than a decade, you're no longer shipping features for survival and should have bandwidth allocated to improve the product reliability and performance.

No observability/monitoring, no automated testing, no CI/CD, a 30 second - 5 minute login time, and a 20mb JavaScript bundle is a pretty poor customer and developer experience.

I spoke to the head of sales / product to understand customer retention and the factors on failed sales - it looks like our customer retention is unaffected by a slow or unreliable the product.

Building deep-tech (say, new kind of radio link) involves years of R&D, specialized manufacturing, and long regulatory or testing cycles. It's uncommon in app business though.
This made me lol as well. I think that’s just a business.