<story><title>The Economics of Building Knowledge Bases</title><url>http://blog.diffbot.com/the-economics-of-building-knowledge-bases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjpuser</author><text>This is a compelling article, but then when you try to see what the product is, you have to submit your email &amp;#x2F; request a demo.  In my experience, hiding your product behind a demo is a bad sign that the product has flaws.  It also puts you in contact with a salesman or account manager which is typically geared towards a high pressure sale event of the product.  I&amp;#x27;d be interested to hear other people&amp;#x27;s experiences with this model, though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sansnomme</author><text>Also for certain products it&amp;#x27;s almost impossible to sell at scale without an enterprise sales team. Developers won&amp;#x27;t be &amp;quot;willing&amp;quot; to pay or admit the need for what&amp;#x27;s basically a glorified web scraper concept that has existed for as long as the web itself. For this sort of product to be successful you need enterprise sales, tons of funding and marketing, among other stuff. Even if your actual product is terrible you will still have a larger segment of market compared to a competitor product that may be more advanced functionality-wise. This is not something that&amp;#x27;s popular on HN because of the constant myth that &amp;quot;if you build a well-engineered product, customers would magically show up&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Economics of Building Knowledge Bases</title><url>http://blog.diffbot.com/the-economics-of-building-knowledge-bases/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjpuser</author><text>This is a compelling article, but then when you try to see what the product is, you have to submit your email &amp;#x2F; request a demo.  In my experience, hiding your product behind a demo is a bad sign that the product has flaws.  It also puts you in contact with a salesman or account manager which is typically geared towards a high pressure sale event of the product.  I&amp;#x27;d be interested to hear other people&amp;#x27;s experiences with this model, though.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>m_ke</author><text>Sometimes with products like this one the value that it provides to the customer varies significantly depending on a use case and it&amp;#x27;s hard to put up pricing without either cutting out a long tail of smaller users or losing money on the big deals.&lt;p&gt;I have an API that market research and medical customers are willing to pay 100x more for than consumer social, at the same time the consumer companies have 100x the volume.</text></comment>