It sounds like most of the customers had a flawed process - or perhaps an actual process that was different from the process they felt they should have. Perhaps they were even in breach of some guidelines legal had drawn up, or even laws or statutes on acquirement.
And it sounds like the product automated a good, sound process. One that was different from the customer's actual, current process.
I don't know how one could hope to sell a new process (incidentally along with an automation framework) without massive training, and, well, consulting.
I'm a little surprised they didn't take the opportunity to pivot. Maybe none of their beta users were interested in the 100x(?) investment buying such a package would cost? It sounds like they found a different market, smaller in number of customers, larger in revenue - and chose to walk away because: software is fun, human process is hard and boring?
It's a valid choice to be sure, but it strikes me as a little odd. I thought the idealised, naive idea of a computer system being more important than the human systems it enables was more of a delusion limited to Silicon Valley, than a general problem.
I'm reminded of how model-view-controller was internally known as model-view-controller-user, and how shortening it to mvc[1] was probably a terrible mistake that obscured most of the valuable idea behind the concept (that of mapping the users mental model of domain knowledge to widgets on the screen and on to the data models used by the software).
And it sounds like the product automated a good, sound process. One that was different from the customer's actual, current process.
I don't know how one could hope to sell a new process (incidentally along with an automation framework) without massive training, and, well, consulting.
I'm a little surprised they didn't take the opportunity to pivot. Maybe none of their beta users were interested in the 100x(?) investment buying such a package would cost? It sounds like they found a different market, smaller in number of customers, larger in revenue - and chose to walk away because: software is fun, human process is hard and boring?
It's a valid choice to be sure, but it strikes me as a little odd. I thought the idealised, naive idea of a computer system being more important than the human systems it enables was more of a delusion limited to Silicon Valley, than a general problem.
I'm reminded of how model-view-controller was internally known as model-view-controller-user, and how shortening it to mvc[1] was probably a terrible mistake that obscured most of the valuable idea behind the concept (that of mapping the users mental model of domain knowledge to widgets on the screen and on to the data models used by the software).
[1] according to a talk Trygve gave, but it kind of shines through in his brief history of mvc too: https://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html