Honestly, you're not miles off. Though with developers, it was actually more the "gotcha" variety of "It sucks ass".
We would have a senior dev on the dealing-making-or-breaking call and he would say something like, "Wait -- sorry, do you support <specific thing that our system doesn't have>?" We would say honestly that we don't have that yet. Then the senior dev would say, "Ooohh.... sorry... yeah... we need (per-message arbitrary data storage | support for on-prem | real-time analytics | per-messsage privacy controls | etc.)." We eventually had to face the reality that one of two things must be true:
1) The market is just too fragmented such that there cannot exist one product that serves it
2) The devs involved really, really don't want to give a product like this a chance because they actually want to build fun features like this themselves and they're (rightfully) skeptical that some random startup can do it better
As I sit here now, I have some confidence that it's 75% #2 and 25% #1. Anyway, the basic shape of the sales calls went a lot like what you're saying.
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Honestly, you're not miles off. Though with developers, it was actually more the "gotcha" variety of "It sucks ass".
We would have a senior dev on the dealing-making-or-breaking call and he would say something like, "Wait -- sorry, do you support <specific thing that our system doesn't have>?" We would say honestly that we don't have that yet. Then the senior dev would say, "Ooohh.... sorry... yeah... we need (per-message arbitrary data storage | support for on-prem | real-time analytics | per-messsage privacy controls | etc.)." We eventually had to face the reality that one of two things must be true:
1) The market is just too fragmented such that there cannot exist one product that serves it
2) The devs involved really, really don't want to give a product like this a chance because they actually want to build fun features like this themselves and they're (rightfully) skeptical that some random startup can do it better
As I sit here now, I have some confidence that it's 75% #2 and 25% #1. Anyway, the basic shape of the sales calls went a lot like what you're saying.