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Ask HN: What Should an Incumbent Do?

1 points by matt3D ↗ HN
A client of mine is software company with a portfolio of predominantly desktop solutions for use in heavy industry.

They moved to a subscription model a few years ago, which in hindsight was probably a mistake as it left a bad taste in their customers mouth. Now as with many other niche software vendors we seem to be hitting this inflection point where the level of effort required to clone the product is low enough to justify it despite the relatively small market.

I’m getting asked by the leadership team what they should be doing to help them navigate this, but I’m struggling to come up with anything. Is anyone else navigating this at the moment and got any good ideas or places to start? One option is pivoting more towards consulting, but that would lead to a lot of redundancies on the development side.

4 comments

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Nicolyn
Have they really not made any functional improvements over the past few years? The AI era has changed the landscape; if they can't demonstrate their uniqueness, there is no reason for customers to subscribe.
matt3D
No particularly. We are toying with the idea of taking the engine of the flagship product, arguably where a lot of the value is, and rebuilding a more flexible front-end onto it.
Benjaminsen
Double down on relationships and high quality costumer support. Nobody you want to work with is going to migrate away from your products if they know you well and you are awesome and responsive to work with.

When anyone can build anything it suddenly becomes important who does it. Build trust, build a history of success, build an industry specific brand.

Don't do stuff like squeezing margins by switching to subscriptions...