Any react fans have thoughts on this? https://medium.com/@ericclemmons/jav...fc4#.7by4lz827

saw that on HN and can't really disagree more. He has it entirely wrong re: react's learning curve which is very simple and way less than angular 1 IMO - react/jsx is just escaped javascript instead of ridiculous viewmodels and there's like 4 methods you need to know inside of the class, render componentwillmount componentdidupdate constructor and how setstate works. Other than that just loop through your arrays and yeah.

His entire point seems to be "tooling is hard" well yeah tooling is part of the job. Webpack supposedly makes things easy, I use gulp because I like manual tooling. But I've used the same core gulpfile for years at least since 6to5 came out. And boilerplate? I have barely any other than the usual plop of import statements. IDK I don't get it. Its not easy sure. You can always go back to Spring..

My whole company is 16-18 people about half developers.

1 sales person.

How much ACV do they produce? SaaS benchmarks at 500k ACV per rep. If you aren't a SaaS business or are functioning more as just outsourced development/consulting (IE Palantir, and a ton of the "SaaS" companies daveT mentioned), then your metrics will be different.

Also, are you referring to all businesses, or ones that can grow to be worth 1b+ with multi-billion TAM? Generally you'll want your VC backable companies to fall into that range. Tho there can be smaller ones that are worthwhile ventures. If we're talking about creating a company worth 40m, then obviously that isn't something VCs are interested in and the point is moot and other financing should be acquired.

Hope we aren't just talking past each other. Businesses are unique and while there are some general models, it is impossible to discuss without drilling down and being more specific. Topic is super interesting tho.

My side project that is my pride and joy.
Has one component that is the client-side built with just html, javascript and multiple canvas that change based on after the browser width is adjusted. It has tons of cool things that can be done to it because it uses socket communication to the server but it just has one goal. Basically the client + server will deal with dynamic changes for the user, yet I still am waiting on apple to release webrtc, so I could put in p2p and that is coming in 2016

I have built the whole thing like a linked list and it uses math to redraw items correctly or change them based on width calculation.
I'm not using any boilerplate for this part of the project and think that its really fun to work on this piece of the project. I've just had to be very particular with naming conventions and its basically coming out as a modular tool, like the goal for the end result is to be. I've basically strayed away from jquery, just canvas, css and javascript.

My only problem is that the codebase for the tool (short code so far), needs to be pulled into modules and i've been not wanting to do it. I basically learned C++ as a functional programmer, I have no problem programming in a non functional programming style but I prefer to tackle pieces one by one. Javascript's module system that es6 came out with looks nice, so i'll probably be tackling it with that path but it seems sort of ugly compared to the C++ or Java way.

I'm trying to merge my programming style but basically am getting disgruntled, maybe over nothing.

Unrelated to React, mostly related to JS imo. I feel it's a pain to setup, especially if you want to understand everything that is going on instead of running one yo command to setup the entire environment (+you might want to read up on alternatives etc.).
React itself seems rather easy to pick up and is well structured imo (clicked a lot easier than Angular 1 for me).

Ultimately, it's worth it though (imo)

The hot reloading junk soured me to the react hipster community a bit. The only way I could get it to work was by copying their example in full and then inserting my src files. I tried doing it manually and it just didn't work even though I went through line by line checking my webpack config, the presence of all npm modules, the other required code etc.

There were a bunch of different ways to do the same thing which bothered me too. You could write your own little hot-load server in node using some package or you could pass an option to the webpack command line, other ways were explicitly stating some plugin name in the webpack config. It was a config nightmare and every example project and tutorial did it differently and the webpack docs were really weak.

I've gone back to angular and gulp. I get the academic/philosophical criticism but at the end of the day angular works fine for my needs. I'm not going back to react/flux unless the community overwhelmingly rejects angular 2, which I doubt is going to happen.

Also note I'm not a full time javascripter. Maybe if I had all day to read through source for the undocumented magic bull**** in webpack I'd feel differently.

I also think the guys working on redux don't have everything fully worked out yet. To add any new feature you need to edit like 6+ files because you need new constants, action creators, reducers (probably edit the main reducer and your specific reducer possibly levels/files deep in a big app) as well as your jsx files... its annoying. If you're using the hotloading functionality you also end up with multiple points of failure. So I found myself flipping between the browsers console and the hot-dev server looking for what went wrong while juggling the 6 new files you just created to add a single button that logs hello world to the console... it's not ideal.

I clicked read on that one since I've seen a few of yours under mine.

FYI, I've had you on ignore for months.

Things getting chippy in the programmer thread!

I believe that.

The companies I was thinking of require people to go out to trade shows, visit clients cross country, give hours long product demos, and other things like that, which is a lot of work compared to a place who focuses on mainly local businesses. The time and cost of doing a sale is very high. I know I've spent a month of blue moons talking to all sort of companies that didn't make a sale with "us."

That was just a remark on the comment about buying a product from a guy working on his laptop. An ERP company that has 1000 employees is much more likely to have 900 sales and support people instead of 900 developers ripping up on Mac Pros (well, Windows because a lot of that is .Net anyways). In a strange way, it barely makes a difference if you think of it as an illusion of developer to salesperson scale, but some quantity of people gives a sense of security to the end-user, though I'm not not sure what the number is.

We're a SaaS (not a custom dev shop either, though for enough $$$ we do that too) and not far from this ratio - about 4:2:1 :: dev:non-dev/non-sales:sales. Our situation is a bit complicated because some people are involved about 50% in sales and 50% elsewhere and we also sell through a joint venture where another company with a significantly larger sales team sells our products.

Custom software development vs software product is a separate spectrum from on-premise software vs SaaS, despite some people trying to narrowly define SaaS as to exclude custom development. If anything, the term SaaS has traditionally been used to describe businesses that are closer to custom software development. No one calls Gmail "SaaS" and everyone calls their custom Salesforce app "SaaS" - this is how the term is actually used.

I still think you are mistaken.

Companies that have 90% salespeople are RED FLAGS. I've seen vendor forms that specifically want to know your sales/non-sales ratios purely as a way to get riffraff out (I've also successfully evaded these as the person they are trying to keep out).

We have clients as far as Singapore and have a proposal to major University in the Middle East.

Any company still using 90% sales people is likely terrible.

gmail is pretty clearly SaaS. I don't know what else you'd try to define it as.

Also, generally SaaS businesses scale up from consumer to enterprise. And you correctly point out there is a lot of bespoke development for larger clients.

Most of your larger companies start out like this where they create something, give it to randoms, sell it to startups, make similar custom software for F500 companies or whatever.

Anyway, so that company can be described as a "SaaS" company, but as time passes and headcount increases, you'll see an obvious change in the focus of marketing/sales/engineering.

But this is all general neckbearding.

LL,

Man you are missing out on learning a ton about how early stage tech companies are financed/grow!

Ours had one dedicated sales person (elite imo) + the founder who did a lot of sales as well but was a developer at heart.
Good enough to sell to central banks and Airbus Group etc.

Lots of B2B companies are set up this way. My guess is if the main founder is technical by nature this will be the default (instead of say the Salesforce model). Typical B2B technical founders are usually fairly hardcore about their specific domain to boot.
I think there's a genuinely different founder type that is attracted to B2B naturally. From anecdotal evidence they tend to be a bit older and come from a domain where stuff is ****ty and want to fix it. They usually understand their customers and the problems in a domain really well and don't need as much validation in that stage.

That's an interesting take. I figure (and hope) I am wrong on this, but I've dealt with far more RED FLAG companies than not, unfortunately. Yes, the vast majority of them are terrible but they are dominating markets I've worked in and these types of companies were the only option.

In any case, why are they red flag companies?

Congratulations on the progress you all are making over there. I'm always glad to learn good news from you.

Thanks, still a long way to go but progress is nice.

The reason it is a red flag is because of perceived value and getting middle-manned.

One of the quick ways to assess the likely value of a Value-Added-Reseller (VAR) is to see how many of their people are salespeople as a %.

If you want to see if your team is spending money smartly or is getting romanced by some expensive system integrator that is really just adding a % to a product or service from an OEM-type, check out the % of sales people in the vendors they want to use.

If you are implementing for example, a large ERP and you are getting a bid from a small professional services company that is 90% sales, they are just charging on top of the resources they find on Monster, Dice, etc. You can probably save money by hiring people yourself and going to the ERP vendor for some direct professional services and training for your people.

It isn't perfect, but it will give you an idea of if a vendor is providing value or taking you out to lunch.

So one way that finance teams trying to protect against bad spending is by looking at things such as % sales people as full-time staff.

Picking good vendors and software providers is something even great companies get wrong pretty much all the time.

It is from a technical standpoint but it's not really a technical term and it's generally not used to describe products like that. No one calls Google search, Facebook or LinkedIn SaaS either. In practice, SaaS is mostly a marketing term used almost exclusively by enterprise software vendors with enterprise sales teams, whether product companies or custom development shops. Compare:

http://www.elliemae.com/about/company-overview
http://www.propertyware.com/company/
http://www.realpage.com/company/

with

https://www.dropbox.com/about
https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/mail/help/about.html
https://www.youtube.com/red

The main reason that SaaS is not used to describe consumer products is because it doesn't matter to consumers what it is that they are using or how it's delivered as long as it's easy and it works. Enterprise software buyers need to distinguish between on-premise software that requires working with internal IT for support and SaaS which requires minimal interaction with IT.

Companies that don't sell through a typical enterprise sales process also don't need to market themselves as SaaS:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket
https://github.com/pricing
https://github.com/about

The vast majority of SaaS businesses are industry-specific enterprise software shops. Crossing over from consumer to enterprise is hard, not to mention that there's virtually no consumer software these days that you can get people to pay enough to make it worthwhile. Most consumer startups these days don't sell software - they sell content and other goods and services and software is just a delivery mechanism. Big companies don't have much need for that. They do need, however, a lot of software specific to their business and are willing to pay a lot of money. There's very little overlap between consumer needs and big business needs and whatever overlap there is is mostly covered by the software giants of the world.

Evernote, Google Apps and Dropbox are the only ones that come to mind and none of them has actually been successful in enterprise.

You're mostly talking about generic productivity tools - that's not "most of your larger companies" and the market is extremely competitive and saturated, not to mention that if you're successful in your first 3 steps, you don't write "similar custom software" for F500 - you write custom software that integrates your successful software with internal or third-party software systems.

The reason that a lot of people are forced to think of generic productivity tools (or developer tools or platforms) when they think of SaaS is because they don't have any applicable industry-specific expertise or connections that they can leverage to carve out a profitable niche. Think health care, education, finance, real estate, insurance, retail, logistics, etc, etc. If you want a google-sized empire it's probably best to go generic - Bloomberg is probably the only truly big software company that focuses on a specific industry niche - but the flipside is that you're pretty much always competing against the best and the brightest with massive amounts of funding in a wide-open, transparent market with little natural barrier to entry.

When I start a company I am going to call it "Service as a Software"

Ha! http://isp.netscape.com/

Notice how fast this "ancient" page loads. I think we've gone backward in web technology.

How do you think this forum is they link to?

http://forums.compuserve.com/discuss...e/ws-politics?

Those are both awesome fast

I couldn't test my sexual knowledge because I don't have flash installed. Now how will I ever know if I'm a cold fish?

RIP Ian Murdock, the "ian" of Debian. Really sad.

http://blog.docker.com/2015/12/ian-murdock/

Hah. Feels like "Service as Software" should be a buzz word (phrase) for when software replaces a traditional job.