Elastic Sales

Good talk. Your method of writing down what the worst case scenario falls in line with what is known as cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is the recommended method of working through mild-to-moderate depressive episodes.

In fact, as a physician observing the HN community, I have acquired a folder of bookmarks, "Depression in Entrepreneurs", mainly centered around Andrews and Thomson's analytic-rheumination hypothesis, which highlights exactly that component of CBT as the cornerstone of successful coping: identify the problems, the worst possible outcomes, prioritize, and start working through them.

My brief summary of the AR hypothesis

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Your hippocampus, home of working memory, gets overwhelmed with all the problems. Something like this:

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It's still crashing!? Wait, I have that widget sitting in /usr/bin still. I'm so hungry. Maybe I should take ritalin, I wouldn't be hungry. My girlfriend is totally pissed because I haven't taken her out in forever. I have to make payroll, but I can't quite do that unless I skip some meals, I can't tell Mr Investor that I can't go to lunch, because I need money. I can't talk to my girlfriend about Investor's lunch because it will just remind her .... shit, was that in /usr/bin or /sbin. Payroll. Lunch. LUNCH! I'M LATE FOR LUNCH WITH MR INVESTOR! AND THE SITE IS DOWN!!!! GREP! WHY DID I CHOOSE BSD!

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So, CBT is a hack, which shunts some of that linguistic processing over to the only other area that does linguistic…

Coudln't agree more.

Some comments as a biz dev guy (and very ordinary coder):

1. Don't feel you need to hire a sales gun with a network. A sales person with an awesome attitude and belief in your product is quite sufficient. I sell to mid-market companies (100-500 employees), that is a pretty huge segment of the AU market and I expect is the same in many other countries. It's literally impossible to expect to hire salespeople who have great connections across such a broad space. The best you will find is they can line up a few "first meetings" in one vertical. Maybe good connections at 1 company, maybe 5, but realistically 15+? Forget it. Any salesperson who tells you differently is talking themselves up more than they should. The job is about cold calling, running events, lots of demo's and lots and lots of discovery, to find real solutions that work for rational business buyers who won't sign off on something until they see its benefits.

2. Have a look at some of the faster growing software firms. They are moving up to enterprise, but often started in SME and the mid market. Start in the middle rungs and you'll find a big hole - comments on some of these threads seems to suggest the decision is binary - either small SME's or large enterprises. The gap in the middle area is huge. You can also generally skip the complications big consultancies bring with them too, most customers budgets and corresponding demands are too small for them to get interested in.

3. B2B…

Here's a few more to add to your list (not all SaaS)...

--ANALYTICS

Snowplow (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow)

Segment.io (http://segment.io)

--CRM

Close.io (http://close.io),

Streak (http://www.streak.com/)

Base (http://getbase.com)

--SALES

ElasticSales (https://elasticsales.com/)

--CUSTOMER SERVICE

Metaverse Mod Squad (http://metaversemodsquad.com/)

--DATA

Factual (http://www.factual.com/)

--DATABASE

Titan (http://thinkaurelius.com/)

Tinkerpop (http://www.tinkerpop.com/)

Bulbs (http://bulbflow.com)

Datomic (http://datomic.com)

--LOG MONITORING

Logstash (http://logstash.net)

Lumberjack (https://github.com/jordansissel/lumberjack)

Fluentd (http://fluentd.org),

Flume (https://github.com/cloudera/flume)

Kafka (http://sna-projects.com/kafka/)

Scribe (https://github.com/facebook/scribe/)

--ACCOUNTING/INVOICING

Harvest (http://www.getharvest.com/)

Ballpark (http://www.getballpark.com/)

PaySimple (http://paysimple.com/)

AcceptPay (http://acceptpay.com)

FreshBooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/)

FreeAgent (http://www.freeagent.com/)

Blinksale (http://www.blinksale.com/)

--PAYMENTS

Balanced Payements (https://www.balancedpayments.com/)

Dwolla (https://www.dwolla.com/)

-- BANKING

Simple (http://simple.com)

--PHONE/PBX/SMS

Plivo (http://plivo.com/)

Tropo (https://www.tropo.com/)

Twillo (http://www.twilio.com/)

PhoneBooth (http://www.phonebooth.com/)

-- PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Orchestra (http://www.orchestra.com/)

-- RECOMMENDATION…

Your business, as many people have assured you, is completely fine. It's actually a great service for some businesses.

Find bigger clients, this will allow you to keep your billings high if your worried about bottlenecks and hiring. Look into https://elasticsales.com/ for cold calling as a service.

Why not do both versions of the business? Create a separate brand and package together services, flat pricing and slap on a healthy markup to offset your advertising and marketing. PPC, Social Media, etc would be great for this.

Get that monthly revenue up and then build a team around your processes. Hiring will always be hit or miss - just make sure your hiring them for what they know and not what they can learn - if you want to save time.

Best of luck!

Elastic (YC W'11) http://elasticsales.com/about/ and http://close.io/ - Mountain View, CA

Great team with an opportunity to grow personally and professionally.
We'll take good care of you ( free lunch and free commute (ridepal.com) from SF )
Work from home wednesdays!
Team Activities
*We believe in working smarter and not harder.

Opportunities:
Hackers and Hustlers.

If you are passionate about selling or passionate about code, I am not saying you have to join our team. But you should at least come by for lunch and meet us.

jason ( my email address is at ) elasticsales ( and then a dot ) com
or call me at 650-618-3138