Understanding who the decision maker is

One of the things I've noticed quite a bit over the years is the end user is often not the decision-maker. The recent demise of Kite, which cited that developers don't pay for their tools as one of the main reasons, reminded me a lot of indie hackers who build for their end-user but rarely target the actual decision-maker.

For me, I'm SaaS boilerplate (https://getparthenon.com) which I'll be pivoting more towards a self-hosted billing system with add-ons. I could target indie hackers like everyone else. But I decided to make it free for indie hackers and focus solely on companies. I want to target startups and enterprises. Which suddenly means the developers and end users of it aren't actually my decision-makers.

The decision maker is the person who can say yes without asking anyone else and authorise the payment.

When I worked for a holiday price comparison site they literally just targeted women. Men go on holiday just like women, but women are generally the decision makers, so why bother with the men when if you sell the women, they'll tell the men what to do?

If you go to an AWS conference, you'll see that most of the talks are aimed at management and non-technical staff. The technical talks are very basic and still are aimed at non-technical people understanding the gist of what is being said. AWS, something that most people think is a technical decision to use, is nearly always decided by non-technical management. So it makes sense that the AWS conferences are mainly focused on them.

For me, if your product is b2b, you need to spend time marketing and building for the managers who will decide if their company uses your product. And often the decision maker might be 2-3 levels abstracted away from the end user.

I think marketing to your end user is also important so they suggest it to their manager, but you need to sell to the manager.