Comment by kcsavvy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kcsavvy | Hacker News Reader

From someone who has built 2 successful enterprise apps as eng #1 (1 sold, 1 going strong today valued over 100M) and worked on others that failed, the ONLY thing to worry about now is whether or not your customers really want and need your app. 99% of enterprise saas products fail because of this, not because of a missing feature.

All the enterprise features like SSO, integrations, audit trails, etc can be built when a customer is asking for them — these are largely solved problems. These are probably attractive problems because they are engineering problems and you are an engineer.

Ignore them and focus on the business problem. “Does my app solve a burning need for my customers?”. Read “The Mom Test” to get in the mindset of answering that question. That is all that matters right now.

I can’t agree more. I have delivered several solutions to local enterprises, with questionable UX, no SSO, p2p integrations. We made changes while implementing, after we signed contract. The only thing you should care is to solve their burning problem and find the person, who has that problem. The rest is easy, not necessarily fast though. It took one year to sign contract.

Can't emphasize the "Burning Problem" part of it more! If it is not a burning problem, it's not a problem worth solving. If your solution is something that is slightly or significantly better than the stuff on the market, but their existing solution is something that still works for them, however complex, they will not buy your product.

Perhaps it is also worth rephrasing it as "a burning problem for the buyer", which might most likely be a stupid unscrupulous solution that doesn't make sense like those sensors they have in hotels to detect employee whereabouts. Stupid and completely useless, but still "a burning problem" for hotel managers.

Adding to this:

First thing should not be finding out what what your customers want.

First thing should be finding out IF THERE EVEN ARE CUSTOMERS for your product.

A product idea that doesn't have any market won't be successful. So find out if there are people who have a problem that can be solved, then try to solve that problem. Additionally the problem has to be annoying enough so people are willing to pay to make it go away. If you have those two, it's a great start.

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