How to advice a HW startup with building a SaaS product?

Question

I work for a small VC-funded hardware startup in Germany and would like to help them/founders make good decsions going forward regarding adding a SaaS product on top of their industrial hardware offerings (which are already doing great). Currently, I run and maintain a very cost-effective semi-automated data-aquisition and ETL pipeline for them.However, mutual understanding proved to be difficult between me as a unix-minded software engineer and the hardware/business people running the company.Often the founders/CEO hear from investors about new technologies such as Kubernetes or cloud offerings from the big fishes such as AWS and Azure or some cathy term and believe just using them will immediately contribute to their success (it will immediately contribute to their costs with no clear gains, investores like it however).How could I best support the founders and CEO in making a software product and let them focus on "what" needs to be done, instead of "how" to do it in your opinion? Or perhaps I need to change my expectations? Either way, I appreciate your input.Thanks.

brudgers · Accepted Answer

[random advice from the internet]Unless you have been asked by the founders to help them in the way you are interested in helping, there is a good chance you will create more friction than lubrication.I mean if you are not in the room with the investors, you don't have the big picture. Because the big picture is money...except in the corner cases where it is only mostly money.Or to put it another way, if you are in opposition to the investors the founders have to make a choice and that choice is not in likely to be you.

ale_jacques · Answer

Numbers. Those people understand numbers. "Prove them wrong" by creating a PoC on what your expectations are versus what they think they are going to get with their theories.