Software Engineering Daily

Most products do not sell themselves. Salespeople bridge the gap between a product creation and a customer who purchases it.

People can make a good living on the internet selling niche products–if they can find their customers. The process of taking a large group of potential customers and narrowing it down to only the subset of those customers who will buy your product is known as the sales funnel. The sales funnel consists of multiple stages–the first of which is known as “prospecting.”

A salesperson doing prospecting is casting a wide net, sending emails to hundreds or thousands of people, looking for anyone who has some small probability of being interested. Without a tool for prospecting, the process can be very labor intensive.

Jean-Baptise Escoyez is the CTO at Prospect.io, a tool for sales prospecting. In this episode, we explored the process of building Prospect.io, from the high level product design to the engineering details of how it is implemented. I use Prospect.io to sell two different products so it was enjoyable to find out how one of my favorite tools works.

Developers love Docker Containers because they give applications portability and consistency all the way from your laptop into production. Amazon EC2 Container Service from Amazon Web Services makes it easy to run Docker apps in the cloud. With Amazon EC2 Container Service, deploying, operating and scaling your infrastructure happens automatically. Best of all, you only pay for the AWS compute and storage resources you use. With Amazon EC2 Container Service, you can focus on building apps, not managing your container infrastructure. Learn more at ecs.aws today.

Spring Framework gives developers an environment for building cloud native projects. On December 4th-7th, SpringOne Platform is coming to San Francisco. SpringOne Platform is a conference where developers congregate to explore the latest technologies in the Spring ecosystem and beyond. Speakers at SpringOne Platform include Eric Brewer (who created the CAP theorem), Vaughn Vernon (who writes extensively about Domain Driven Design), and many thought leaders in the Spring Ecosystem. SpringOne Platform is the premier conference for those who build, deploy, and run cloud-native software. Software Engineering Daily listeners can sign up with the discount code SEDaily100 and receive $100 off of a Spring One Platform conference pass. I will also be at SpringOne reporting on developments in the cloud native ecosystem. Join me December 4th-7th at the SpringOne Platform conference, and use discount code SEDaily100 for $100 off your conference pass.

Flip the traditional job search and let Indeed Prime work for you while you’re busy with other engineering work, or coding your side project. Upload your resume and in one click, gain immediate exposure to companies like Facebook, Uber, and Dropbox. Interested employers will reach out to you within one week with salary, position, and equity up front. Don’t let applying for jobs become a full-time job. With Indeed Prime, jobs come to you. The average software developer gets 5 employer contacts and an average salary offer of $125,000. Indeed Prime is 100% free for candidates – no strings attached. Sign up now at indeed.com/sedaily.

Cloudflare runs 10% of the Internet, providing performance and security to millions of websites. Many of you probably already use Cloudflare on your sites. We’re not talking about using Cloudflare today though, we’re here to talk about building on top of it. If you’re a developer you can build apps which can be installed by the the millions of sites which rely on Cloudflare. You can even sell your apps; they can make you money every month. Visit cloudflare.com/sedaily to watch how you can build and deploy an app in less than 3 minutes.