Small Businesses vs. Corporations: What Tech Tools Are We Missing? | Hacker News Reader

Small Businesses vs. Corporations: What Tech Tools Are We Missing?

24 pointslucadidomenico49 comments

I was browsing Y Combinator's latest Request for Startups and one prompt caught my attention:

"Develop tools that help small businesses operate at the same level as large corporations"

This got me thinking: What critical operational capabilities are small businesses currently lacking?

What technological or strategic barriers prevent them from competing on equal footing with larger enterprises?

I'm curious to hear from entrepreneurs, small business owners, and tech enthusiasts:

What tools or systems do you wish existed?

What daily/weekly/monthly tasks feel unnecessarily complex or time-consuming?

What do large corporations do that seems out of reach for smaller organizations?

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> "Develop tools that help small businesses operate at the same level as large corporations"

This goal sounds soooo wrong in sooo many ways. How 'large corporations' operate is not a good thing to emulate.

I have worked in this space for +25 years and even touched some government, and the single best thing I see is to remove something made for `large corporations` and replace it with something way simpler.

I even live from it, my main app (https://www.bestsellerapp.net) is basically a re-made front-end for take orders and invoices for several ERPs. People pay me for DON'T use the entry forms of those ERPs, go figure!.

In fact, if you wanna destroy super-fast a small business make it adopt some big 'large corporations' tech or process and see how things collapse, be this an ERP (the biggest culprit), micro-services, kubernetes or whatever.

---

But let's be charitable and assume here 'same level as large corporations' is more like a ideal thing than a actual thing.

I have said before than a small company needs all, so everything you see as a tool for a big company, a small one needs it, but simpler and better integrated.

They, certainly not need multi-cluster,multi-node things. Single-server + backups and that is all.

Good examples of this stuff:

* Access, if it were good

* Visual FoxPro, but modern

* Integrated log, metrics, alert

* Metabase or similar for dashboarding

* An orchestration tool for ETL, but tailored for this space

Probably something actually good from big companies that is missing here is a good way to deploy, rebuild, install the OS + APP in a consistent way, like NixOS.

Operational maturity - small-to-medium sized businesses will often treat things like their oncall as an afterthought as they grow, leading to every team doing things differently & chronically burnt out individual "heroes" taking on too much of the burden.

Large corporations are able to allocate dedicated FTEs to tackle this and standardise their processes around best practices. Things like the ability to staff "follow-the-sun" rotations that just aren't feasible at smaller scales.

I'm building Rezible (https://github.com/rezible/rezible) to address this. The aim is to provide an "oncall on rails" experience for teams, with best practices encoded into the product for engineers to follow.

There’s a reason most business and technology tools target enterprise and not SMB - the economics don’t work to target SMB. It’s much easier to convince a middle manager at some bigco to buy your solution for 100k than it is to convince 100 small business owners to buy your tool for 1k.

It’s not just about a more difficult GTM motion. Support and back office costs are actually higher as well. All of this makes it much riskier to go down market.

Maybe the first thing we need is not more tools for SMBs from companies doomed to fail from the beginning, but a platform that would enable these startups to efficiently serve the SMB market and address these fundamental problems.

That’s true relative to a VC backed startup, but not necessarily true for bootstrapped or startups looking to create sustainable companies. Look at base camp for instance

Not sure exactly what you have in mind as a solution for small businesses, but I’ve been working on enabling small businesses to achieve a high level of customization with minimal effort by leveraging Google Sheets and the Google Apps Script environment.

You can check out my work here: https://www.centask.com/

As a software developer I have learned that if there is something I wished existed then I should just write it myself. Otherwise I could be waiting for eternity or for something shitty.

Most of the things I wished existed, only to end up writing myself, tend to be things like:

* Dashboards. I don’t mean bar charts or business analytics insanity. I just mean a flat list of things and whether they are green or red in real time.

* Media access. Jellyfin and Plex are great and really solve for 90% of that space, but for that last 10% I have personal solutions.

* Container management. Kubernetes is too complicated. I can really solve for that more directly with a good dashboard and proper scripted access on top of that dashboard.

* Managed streams. Services work better when they are bit streams instead of over-engineered HTTP insanity. So for that I wrote my own WebSocket solution that I can independently scale and extend in different ways that may sometimes violate RFC6455.

Others have responded with great answers that are prolly spot on to your question about "Tech Tools". I'll just add in accounting services for small businesses, there are a lot of software and service solutions aimed at the sole-proprietor, and not _designed to scale_ past one or two business entities. So much so that speaking with service support as one person among four business management and four operations managers, I'm often addressed as the owner ('your company'), or they want to send a 2FA text message to your phone (as if there was one mobile phone number). Their default is to assume they're dealing with an owner. To scale means to just double or triple everything--accounts, logins, which leads to the confusion about whose 2FA is really being used. ha!

An open marketplace for consultations similar to Stack overflow but with the guarantee that my problem will be solved.

As a sole ML developer in a small company, I can't reach out to someone who can guide me specific to my problem. AI can definitely help but there is no human assurance providing guarantee of end result. I don't consider discussion websites or blogposts to be helpful because I have to personally learn from mistakes as I implement solutions.

As a generalist consultant, they would have seen many common problems across the industry and can cross pollinate ideas across industries. They will also develop a kind of tribal knowledge of dos, donts, best practices, best libraries so that I don't have to do it myself.

Maybe this exists and I haven’t found it yet but a lightweight logging/alerting solution would be nice. That way, I don’t have to invest in Datadog with all the extra bells and whistles targeted for enterprise customers.

I thought someone was working on an open source Datadog. Forget what that was

Prometheus? Grafana?

(shameless plug) maybe it was us?

https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

Look at ntfy.sh. From the website:

ntfy (pronounced notify) is a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, and/or using a REST API. It's infinitely flexible, and 100% free software.

The problem is there are piecemeal solutions to the several of the parts of this problem, but not all, and some of them are really hard to meaningfully self-host without significant risk or complexity (ie. full text search engine). I'd personally love to build something like this, but I absolutely would sell yearly licenses and not have it be fully open source.

Where is your cutoff for lightweight?

I personally am a big fan of self-hosting Sentry via their Helm chart. It's quite easy if you know your way around Kubernetes, but it probably also doesn't qualify as lightweight.

Is this an actual problem domain? What is the perception of "level" in this context? I think that large corporations and small companies operate at different levels and don't have the same problems so they don't need the same solutions. There is no need to have equal footing.

An example to argue my point: a small hamburger restaurant vs. McDonalds. The small mom-n-pop hamburger place does not need HR systems, an ERP for supply chain & logistics, a large marketing and promotions department, a fancy business intelligence platform, etc. McDonalds needs all of that because all of their franchises depend (aka pay) them to supply them, do marketing, etc. The small hamburger place has no interest in government contracts, like a McD's at every army base, and is very far away from needing anything like a large corporation until they are closer to that size.

The small burger place doesn't have processes in place to scale, they have Bob the cook who likes to season the burgers liberally and Sally the other cook who holds back a little on the salt but typically adds extra pickles. McD's probably has a set of procedures on how to cook everything uniformly, season the same, count the number of pickles, the amount of ketchup, etc. all the same.

Smaller businesses operate effectively more so because of the people at them. Large corporations operate effectively through top down processes, procedures and bureaucracy with replaceable people.

A big one I think is the ability to bid for government contracts. There are often calls for proposals for some relatively small, specific piece of work that could be fulfilled by a smaller company, but because the bidding process itself is so arcane, the contract gets awarded to some giant firm that has lawyers and knows how to negotiate the bidding process.

A way to streamline that process to make it fairer and more transparent could be a win for many people - though obviously large established government contractors don't want that to happen.

It sounds like something that can't be built without the collaboration of the governement

Is this a problem you have or ideation? Tools to help small businesses efficiently manage government RFPs and bids exist. I remember a few years ago startup in my local area got a good bit of funding and press for this concept.

Based on my experience, small businesses commonly struggle with:

1. Establishing scalable marketing and sales channels

2. Finding automation tools to eliminate operational bottlenecks

These businesses typically lack both the resources and incentives to reinvent everything. Moreover, they often cannot afford or effectively manage complex commercial software solutions, both of which are routine expectations in corporate environments.

> What critical operational capabilities are small businesses currently lacking?

ERP / Accounting + Finance + Corporate Treasury integration (with ILP Interledger)

/? ERP accounting site:news.ycombinator.com site: github.com https://www.google.com/search?q=erp+accounting+site%3Anews.y...

/? ERP https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

/? SMB https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Access to markets. Trust from large customers.

Maybe tools that would enable small business to act in consortia for larger contracts?

Can you make an example?

My biggest problem as a small business is larger organizations saying "you're too small" or "what if you go out of business" or "we love your proposal but we're worried that [next management level up] will think you're too small" etc...Or in some cases government contracts state a minimum level of turnover for 3 years which is mandatory to bid.

Often what does happen is that I attach myself to a larger organization who do not much except provide reputation and then I do the work.

I don't know what I'm asking for but something that would address this would be wonderful.

> Develop tools that help small businesses operate at the same level as large corporations

Smaller companies usually work faster than large corporations. What they don't have is massive amounts of capital.

That's the same thing I thought at first.

However, having massive amounts of capital means you can hire more people and buy expensive tools.

Security.

Having to pay for SAML and SCIM integration.

MDM and EDR.

Security baseline configuration deployments for different OS.

It’s a farce.

You mean the security in large organizations is a farce?

SAML/ SCIM Integration are often buggy or doesn't work as advertised..

MDM is just a circus in making, EDR can be easily bypassed...

Pentests are barely worth more than script kiddies even from well known and recognized vendors.

I am not even specialized in sec and it drives me crazy the amount of bypass/work around in IT organizations while pretending everything is well managed and design.

Re: IAM cost workarounds in SMBs, SAML / Oauth2/OIDC / LDAP:

From "Show HN: Skip the SSO Tax, access your user data with OSS" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35529042 :

glim: https://github.com/doncicuto/glim

"Proxy LDAP to limit scope of access #60" https://github.com/doncicuto/glim/issues/60

glauth: https://github.com/glauth/glauth

slapd-sql: https://linux.die.net/man/5/slapd-sql

gitlab-ce-ldap-sync (PHP) https://github.com/Adambean/gitlab-ce-ldap-sync

Open Source SSO for SMB

"Launch HN: SSOReady (YC W24) – Making SAML SSO painless and open source" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41110850 :

ssoready: https://github.com/ssoready/ssoready

How the financials are performing. Usually small business owners lack either time or knowledge to monitor the overall business performance, meaning if the business is on red or black numbers. Day to day and lack of good financial foundations inhibit operators to check the facts over time.

This is a good point.

But do you think this is caused by a lack of tools or just a lack of time/managing capabilities by business owners?

Genuinely asking

I think it's caused by lack of knowledge, as you said, lack of managing capabilities, most of them doesn't know accounting, say reading a balance, cash flows, asn something worst, I've seen, that in retail where cash is abundant, some people do not understand that this money is not theirs, is borrowed money by the suppliers.

I’ve seen that too. A lot of people think that business is magic. Heck, plenty of publicly traded companies think that too!

Adding my experience as the owner of a small corporation, for me the struggle is _time_. We have taken the time to build things slowly and methodically; intentionally trading fast growth for building a foundation. In a way we’re intentionally operating in a manner that is anti-modern-startup.

No matter how lean our processes, despite the fact that most of our accounting processes are automated in an ERP, and having the benefit of formal college courses in corporate accounting, there are still manual tasks I have to perform _all throughout the business_ (and in finance) that I struggle to balance with other tasks.

One of the most practical things small businesses struggle with is human power. Hiring an employee is expensive, and for us, we’re in the middle ground where we don’t have enough work or income to justify bringing on someone else.

I refuse to sacrifice my work/life balance and I’d rather spend my career building a business that can pay off in the long run rather than next year. Lately I’ve needed to spend more on the “life” side so I have. That’s a luxury I have, which I acknowledge. Not all have that.

Interesting question! My view is that many small businesses operate far, far more efficiently than corporations. Most, if not all, corporations I've worked at and dealt with, have been enormously effective. Most small business I've interacted with, generally are quick, efficient, and interested in me as a customer.

That being said however, as a business owner myself, I'd say that the two biggest enemies I have that makes me less effective is the government, my bank, and my accountant.

The government steals my money and makes me jump through hoops for things that should be simple. The bank just generally does not want to do anything but being a branch of government, and my accountant is just an extra drag on my profits forced on me by... the government.

So if the Y-entrepreneurs could find ways of removing those three, that would certainly be something I would pay money for! =)

The government is also the reason I don't rob you, competitors don't cut/jam your phoneline at busy times, the reason you can buy from wholesalers and trust their product not to be poison or counterfeit, and you don't have to pay protection money to the mob.

You'd probably be making far less without the government's involvement.

Just playing devil's advocate.

People have been told this for generations yet the "I did it all alone" narcissistic delusion persists. If the incoming administration does what it promises, we may see them learn their error the hard way.

Well... WE will learn their error the hard way. They're well set up to already fill those other positions that were mentioned.

> government is also the reason I don't rob you

This speaks more to your character more than everyone else's.

> the reason you can buy from wholesalers and trust their product not to be poison or counterfeit

Amazon is the second largest company on planet earth. Everyone's apparently okay with that.

> you don't have to pay protection money to the mob.

Just a monthly fee for everything from heated seats to garage doors and forced obsolescence for everything that hasn't been turned into a subscription yet.

> Just a monthly fee for everything from heated seats to garage doors and forced obsolescence for everything that hasn't been turned into a subscription yet.

To be fair, that type of nonsense is something only the government can really deal with on a general level. (Obviously we need to actually care about it enough for that to happen, but still.)

No it's not. Literally any other company can deal with that.

How do other companies come into play if you buy a car and are suddenly told 6 months later that you need to pay up or they will disable the heated seats you got?

By selling cars that don't do that.

This looks like something a tool can't solve :D

Seems like you need your accountant since you can’t count to three

You need need to structure your business right to avoid those 3 things.

Which Request for Startup is this? I'm not able to find it

None and the problem I see is we have too many tools

Change Control.

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