No Calls

The title on the website says "licensing & distribution", the paragraph under that repeats it and the code example shows some software trying to authorize a serial key to see if it's valid or not.

I'm not sure how they could make it clearer? Maybe I'm in some sort of licensing-bubble, yet I haven't actually done any of those things myself, just seemed crystal-clear what it is from spending 30 seconds on the top of their website.

Really? They handle license keys (generation, registration, checking). I didn't feel this was that confusing (aside from being kind of an outdated problem).

I've been reading about landing pages for my project, and the standard formula is apparently to place that front-and-centre, with what your product actually does second. So often, though, it seems like they're so eager to tell you how brilliant the product is, they forget to tell you what it actually does.

And maybe that appeals to some people? I went with "Learn a language while you browse the web" for https://nuenki.app, and interestingly I have much more success from HN readers (technical people who may be interested in languages) than people from Reddit's language subreddits (interested in languages, generally not technical).

So I wonder if it's a difference in attitudes based on different groups. The hacker news crowd is asking "What have you built?", and intend to work out whether they think it's worth it once they know what you made, while reddit users go "How can this help me?".

Perhaps I should create a second landing page, a/b test it, and collect some stats.

Yeah, product websites have turned into pharmaceutical ads. "Ask your doctor about Blogprexa!"

>Most salespeople when you're on the phone with them do not care about you as a customer. They care about making their quota and/or getting their commission.

This is my experience too, along with sunk cost. It's one thing to look at a few service and compare pricing and product, it's a whole different thing to book 5 different calls with 5 different companies before you can even begin to decide what to do, it gets extra bad when you have questions they can't answer, so you book an additional call in which you are informed that some important feature is out of the question and tadaa, you just wasted a whole lot of time for a bunch of people with nothing to show for it.

Anecdotally, I find engineers are way more prone to omitting the video feed and to lean on emails as response mechanism. I guess there's also a "people's person" vs "things person" thing going on.

> we don't do commissions, we just pay good salaries

The semi-joke I always heard about this was that if you don't pay commissions, you'll hire a sales team who are good at selling you that they are doing a good job, rather than selling the prodct.

Nah, you definitely need calls. The idea that any product sells itself to the point that a venture backed startup needs is laughable. Lots of potential customers are clueless but excited and in order to book large contracts, you need someone to be a steward to work the contract through the byzantine maze of leadership and procurement.

Salespeople harangue you for calls because it's objective fact that it works to bring more dollars in, and the idea that they say some magic words and then the customer suddenly wants to buy is childish. They identify and address needs and pain points.

> you seem to be communication-averse

Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now.

I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.

Not the parent, but I love communication. I love being able to send a chat message to a teammember and get a response in an hour, or an email at 8pm and read the response next morning. What I hate is having to schedule calls for next Friday just to get a response to a basic question, or being dragged into pointless half an hour meeting just to say two sentences about what I'm doing today.

But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff

Some of us are time-wasting averse. I am never going to recommend a product without a lot of answers, and it is never going to get green-lighted without my boss feeling confident of the answers. The faster I get the answers, the more likely we are to follow-up. When getting answers is like pulling teeth, other solutions get considered, including "develop something in-house".

> Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.

That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.

They're not communication-averse. They're just not stupid.

The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available.

This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.

I absolutely love communication, meeting people, etc. as far as it makes sense! Typically is much better written. Everything can be forwarded, is documented, no misunderstandings…

You seem confidant in your ability to present your exact needs and understand the product and so on, that's good, you're probably right.

But when it comes to something complex, something someone hasn't used before, and all the options and dynamics between enterprise departments that might not be pulling in the same direction, an email almost never covers it and often enterprises aren't aware of it to put it in an email.

If you don't address / discover those things it is potentially a recipient for disaster for everyone.

I've been on numerous calls where a potential customer is on the call and even asking about basic features, then one department head explains to the other "Well we can't do that because X,Y,Z and our other systems A,B,C." and it's the first those two departments REALLY heard each other talk about that. Then we find ways to sort it out.

I've even been on calls where for most of it I'm just there, not doing anything, it's the customer discovering their own processes and working it out internally.

In email that's almost always "we can't do that" because of course not, they're alone with their email, nobody is explaining or offering solutions.

Right or wrong it's just human nature and email doesn't work for some things.

One of the most infuriating b2b calls I've ever been on was setup by our vendor to sound like this. After almost a year of using their product (on a month to month plan), they wanted to check-in and see what features we were using, what we liked, didn't like and show us the new stuff they'd released etc. And then in the last 10 minutes of an hour long call, they dropped a little "we just need to go over some administrative details" bomb where they started negotiations to get us on a year long contract. I will never accept another discovery call from this vendor again. It was such a huge piss off.

> In a call you can't be ignored or left on read for 4 hours.

You also have no time to formulate a thoughtful answer to complex questions, though, which is one my issues. Calls are fine for some things, but 90% of calls could be an email because they contain discussion that needs more than 15 minutes of thinking. And a lot of the time, these calls need a summary email to even keep track of what was said!

I think the gap issue in async communication is a feature, not a bug.

4 hours is a perfectly reasonable response time for an email. It’s not IM

> In a call you can't be ignored

As someone on the Autistic spectrum... yes, yes you most certainly can. When you're speaking I'm (not necessarily voluntarily-)daydreaming about my current hyperfocus/obsession. I'm tuned-in just enough to not reply with something so far out of left field that it gives away that my attention is elsewhere, but I'm definitely not listening to you. Your words are going in one ear and right out the other. I'll shoot you an e-mail for "clarification" later.

I hate this about myself and I've worked very hard to overcome it, but after thirty-seven years I've learned to accept that it's my baseline. I'll have to actively work against it for the rest of my life.

Unfortunately, this applies to meetings and lectures as well. In school and, later, university I had to go to class and teach myself the material each night.

You seem to be doing this in good faith but honestly, there is no difference between 'Discovery Call" and a "Sales Call". The point is that the customer has to speak with someone first. I do think it is required for enterprise deals but the premise of your post seems to say otherwise.

But the entire article is based on the decision to remove "book a call" from the Enterprise pricing.