Tackle Requires No Engineering, Enables 3x Increase in Average Sale Price
Executive Summary
Snyk helps developers do their job quickly while staying secure. It does this by finding and automatically fixing vulnerabilities in their custom code, open source dependencies, containers, and infrastructure as code. To get their solution quickly listed in the AWS Marketplace, Snyk partnered with Tackle and their Cloud Marketplace Platform, built on AWS Lambda, to provide a zero-engineering approach to listing, integrating, and managing everything the Snyk team needs to sell successfully. Since its initial launch, Snyk has experienced a good deal of success. In 2021 alone, the company has closed more than 50 deals through AWS Marketplace leveraging private offers, revenue has grown dramatically, and the time it takes to get new products listed has been cut in half — all without requiring any time or resources from their in-house engineering and operations teams.
Key Highlights
3x Increase
in the average sale price over non-Marketplace offers
50 Private Offers
in one year of leveraging Tackle
Time Savings
through Tackle's documentation, APIs, and clear reporting
Freeing up engineers to focus on engineering
The team at Snyk had previous experience with the AWS Marketplace and so, as they developed their offerings, they knew it was where they needed to get Snyk listed if they wanted to grow successfully. They also knew that doing so in the right way would involve a lot more than just posting a public listing. It would require taking a high-level, strategic approach with a very deliberate methodology. Also, like many startups, the company’s engineering resources were fairly limited and costly. “We could have taken engineers and assigned them to the task, but doing so wouldn’t have made sense for a number of different reasons, mainly the opportunity cost involved,” says Udi Nachmany, VP Global Cloud Strategy with Snyk. “There’s a kind of sherpas angle to the service and guidance that Tackle provides.” That includes a knowledge of things like best practices for AWS Marketplace sales, strategies for scaling AWS Marketplace businesses, and how to remove the deployment burden from the engineering team.
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
Snyk avoided the common mistake startups often make of simply getting their product listed on as many Marketplaces as possible. “Some think the way to achieve success is by taking a scattershot approach; to get their products listed everywhere and hope a few purchases here and there will add up,” Nachmany says. “Sometimes you can get lucky by doing that, but it normally doesn’t work that way. A much stronger approach is to define AWS Marketplace within a clear sales strategy with the help of a partner like Tackle that knows the strengths of the AWS Marketplace.”
A successful deployment that targets enterprise customers
Snyk knew what they wanted to accomplish. The company has a free product tier, but its purpose is to build usage among individual developers and open source contributors. To be successful commercially, it needed to also secure agreements with business and enterprise customers further down the funnel. And so, while Snyk knew what it wanted to do and the huge potential the AWS Marketplace held, it needed help understanding how to fit those goals into their deployment strategy. That’s where Tackle really delivered. “The implementation was seamless,” Nachmany says. “Tackle really helped us understand how to align our sales goals with the deployment.”
For example, Tackle provides detailed, centralized reporting tools that help the Snyk team track deals every step of the way. As a result, Snyk is able to receive granular transaction and contract information that isn’t included with standard Marketplace reporting tools — all without requiring any time or effort from their engineering team.
Tackle provides the API, documentation, and more
Once listed in the AWS Marketplace, Tackle also helps sophisticated customers like Snyk streamline the engineering effort required to further increase efficiencies and maximize returns.
“When Tackle is able to enter the equation and say ‘here’s an API, here’s documentation’ — that’s a big time saver,” Nachmany says.
VP Global Cloud Strategy, Snyk