I greatly appreciate you taking the time to comment. FWIW, the other feedback I received is that I should charge my normal hourly rate (~$500/hr). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In many cases TM pays venues to be their exclusive ticketing company. Before TM, venues purchased hardware and software. One of the most genius business moves of all time was this business model innovation.
TM does not keep all the fees they collect, but since the market views them as predatory they are providing "hated company" as a service for their customers.
With respect to dynamic pricing or pricing in general, TM is going to charge a percentage of the transaction as a fee and thus make more when demand is high along with their customer (the venue) and the producer/talent (the venue's customer). It's a complex supply chain.
We had this issue and went back and forth with Google for weeks with no progress. It was infuriating, since the peeps on the other end just cut and pasted responses.
Then, we hashed the Contacts before uploading them and our app was immediately approved.
Subsequently, they decided to ding us on this permission "QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES", which we needed for inviting people you know to our app. Since we were so beaten down, we removed that feature. Congrats Google!
(Dear Walnut/DemoStack/Reprise CEO- I know your stuff is invaluable and literally spits out money for each company who adopts it, but you're underachieving pretending to be a mission critical enterprise system of record. I would be demoing your system right now if you showed me your pricing.)
Good point. We would have no interest in paying for or managing SSO. Sorry for not being articulate.
My point is that since Decipad is not a client app that creates documents on the file system, my recommendation would be to integrate with the Office 365 ecosystem to gain SSO with Office 365 so that our users could easily navigate to Decipad. For us, that would be table stakes.
Congrats! Whether it's Notion, Google Docs/Sheet/Slides, Coda, Figma, Adobe Cloud, iCloud, Slack, Google Drive, One Drive, etc. the issue for me is content management and SSO. There is a high bar to get anointed to manage content inside a company/team.
For example, we use Office 365 and OneDrive for file management. But, I prefer Keynote over PowerPoint. Saving Keynote to OneDrive folders works perfectly fine. Of course that means anyone who wants to edit my documents needs OneDrive and Keynote, but that's reasonable for our team.
To use Decipad, Notion, Coda, Google Docs etc. We would need a way to manage the documents in OneDrive, an authentication mechanism so that the documents can be open and edited from OneDrive. Whether it's OneDrive, Box, DropBox, or GDrive my issue might be the same for others.
Just rewrite the software to run on Mac & Windows and save documents as files, and then we would give it a try :-)
We switched to Ramp earlier this year because Brex couldn't get their banking integration to work, which impacted our credit limit. Fortunately, we moved everything to Ramp long before the recent email from Brex firing us as a customer. We like Ramp because the banking and Quickbooks integrations work.
Tangentially, I'm also guessing you can learn a lot by asking if they have an API for partners/customers, and if their application developers use the API internally, and then by looking at the API to see how well it is architected. When we integrate with 3rd party systems it's pretty easy to detect the well engineered systems from the ones built with baling wire and duct tape.
Thanks for writing this down @Ken. You're another example that learning the failure modes is the main benefit of being a consultant for many clients. Since I'm sure you began each audit meeting with the CTO/VPE and possibly others like senior devs/architects, how much of what you ended up finding in the audits was predictable based on those meetings? (I'm guessing almost everything).
My follow-up question is that once you heard about their snazzy microservices architecture, were you ever surprised by it being a good decision based on the product type and how well it was engineered?
Apple has been highly supportive of what we're doing. I mentioned Apple because it's difficult in different ways and there are many edge cases; especially with BT & wired headsets.
I can affirm that beating devices into submission is possible :-) We support iOS too with PTT headsets, Airpods, and other BT headsets and that gets interesting in different ways.
Based on my experience, it seems hardware vendors are not treating soft-keys as a core requirement and are generally bolting support on and in some cases omitting it. It's as if the requirements didn't include third party app support beyond the carriers PTT products that they OEM.