A valuable learning building PerfAgents: sell the sleep, not the…

★ A valuable learning building PerfAgents: sell the sleep, not the software ★

I bootstrapped my last company to real ARR with a team of 20 and zero outside funding. Here is the single most useful thing I learned about enterprise.

Enterprise does not buy features. The champion and the teams at these enterprises buy the 𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱 at night.

We built synthetic monitoring. Deeply unglamorous.

Our whole job was watching whether other companies' software was up, and paging the right person the moment it was not.

One of our customers was a fintech whose components sat inside the checkout flow of major US retailers such as Nordstrom and Lululemon. So while you were on one of those sites, moving toward buying something, our nodes around the world were quietly running that same path over and over. Not pinging a homepage.

Walking the real sequence, hitting the real APIs, from Frankfurt, from Singapore, from Virginia, every few minutes.

When something broke, we woke up the engineer who owned it. Before a single customer noticed.

That was the entire product. Nobody's engineer wants to learn about the outage from a customer on social media.

Not once did a feature list close a deal. What closed deals was answering one question fast and convincingly: what happens when your thing breaks at 3 am.

That reframe changed how I sell everything. Nobody at a Fortune 500 wants a dashboard. They want to not get the call from their CEO asking why checkout is down. They want to not be the person who gets blamed. Sell to that, the fear and the relief, not the fan's excitement about your UI.

The person who loves your demo is rarely the person who signs. Find the one who gets blamed when things break. That is your buyer.

The unsexy truth about monitoring, and honestly about a lot of great products: the better you do your job, the less anyone notices you.

We were most successful precisely when we were invisible.

Some of the best software is the thing nobody ever has to think about.

Founders, what is the "sleep at night" version of the thing you are selling?

Drop your comments.