Ask HN: Enterprise Start-ups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Enterprise Start-ups?

There has been a lot of talk about entrepreneurs ignoring Enterprise start-ups. I think the main reason for this, is a lot of us don't work in the enterprise, therefore don't know the pain points.

That being said, how would an entrepreneur get into the enterprise without working for one, or with little or no experience with it?

What Ideas are out there for startups in the enterprise? (pg?)

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Based on previous comments people have posted on HN in the past:

1)Going from initial meeting to completed sale is a very long, drawn out process with a very large group of shareholders, be it IT, HR etc. Having runway to last this long is problematic and is almost the opposite of the "iterate quickly" model of most startups.

2)Enterprise support levels vary from what most startups can offer, you may need regional reps, on/offsite support, call centre staff etc. a few FAQ pages and a getsatisfaction account aren't going to cut it.

2)Politics can play a large part of the decision making process which is out of your control.

Navigating corporate bureaucracy (its politics, legacy systems and cost centers) is the pain point and the reason efficiencies are sometimes not implemented, even by people working within corporations. That said I see that very thing as the opportunity - there are tricks that smart operators use to navigate enterprises successfully. To get a foot in the door, track down some relevant contacts (friends, LinkedIn etc). Contact them and offer to take them to coffee/lunch to chat about what you can do for them. Don't go hard on the sales pitch at this point - just build rapport. At the coffee, it's all about learning about them - what are the strategic priorities of their business unit, and the company as a whole? (You need to slot into this). What would success look like to them? (This is not just results and efficiencies for the company, but your contact within the company will want the internal kudos for pushing through change with minimal pain and maximum visible benefit). Stage three is to provide them with the proposal - the pressure point here is to feed your contact all the materials and party lines they need to get you across the line with their various internal stakeholders. Help them help themselves - case studies and referees help here, and enterprises are all about the 'value add', so emphasize your 'above and beyond', added-value features. Your branding and market positioning will also need to align with the standard of enterprise you're aiming to work with - e.g. if you're aiming for top-tier enterprises you'll need prestige branding and a value proposition akin to being 'smart' or 'efficient' or 'innovative' etc. Many large enterprises have 'preferred supplier' or 'preferred vendor' lists so (depending on your product/service) you'll want to edge your way onto it - it helps to belong to any relevant industry associations and undertake a bit of healthy corporate social responsibility (offset your carbon usage, pro-bono charity work etc). Once you have one enterprise on board, leverage that connection to get to their competitors. (A slow-cooker version of consumer virality - name drop to their competitors that you've been working with them, and they're more likely to jump on the bandwagon). I'm sorry if I'm rambling, I hope this helps! :)

I know of two ways:

- do consulting work and build custom software until you have a good sense for the problems. Once you know what customers want, throw away everything you coded and re-implement as a product. It is very difficult to reach escape velocity this way - you will be very dependent on consulting revenue, making it hard to stop consulting and work on product. But if you don't know the domain, this is your best bet.

- make a product that an employee in your target market could/would pay for themselves. Once you have a product users love, you can work out enterprise features like on-site deployment and system/data integration. The individual user revenue will finance your development, and sustain you through the infamous "enterprise software sales cycle", and its longer, more painful cousin the "enterprise software deployment cycle".

If you want ideas: pick a target industry, then talk to users. Literally ask them what frustrates them about their work. Life in the enterprise is _full_ of frustration, it doesn't take long to find a good problem to work on :).

The harder part is picking the right target industry. My advice is to pursue customers you admire. You want to love meeting and talking to your customers, since you'll spend a lot of time obsessing over them...

Been there, done that.

I can tell you that - as a startup - it's next to impossible to make a deal before you run out of money. With enterprise customers it takes at least several months from the first sales pitch to striking a deal. There are one or two startups though which managed to pull this off. Atlassian comes to mind.

That being said, from currently freelancing in enterprise software development once more (sadly, bills have to be paid ...) there are lots of pain points in enterprise IT environments. Enterprise IT basically is lacking in every respect. Time tracking, ERP, CRM, ticket management, document management, I can hardly think of any area enterprise IT isn't light years behind what I'm normally used to. Problem is, there already are tons of better products for each of those areas. Tragically, once they've made a purchase decision enterprise customers are highly unlikely to switch to a different product, no matter how much better it is. This is the reason why the likes of Oracle, IBM and SAP are so formidable at selling their crappy software and it's also the reason why I currently have to put up with an HP issue tracking system that actually requires IE6 to run and is so far behind any other issue tracking system out there, - free or not.

Many of the emerging enterprise centric companies you hear about today initially got their start selling to SMBs/sole proprietors. Instead of targeting large enterprises from the get-go, start with small business owners and talk to them about their pain points and the issues facing their business. Odds are you'll identify a problem that you can profitably address quickly (enterprise sales cycle sucks) and sell later on to larger enterprises who have the same problem (if that's the eventual direction you want to take).

For example, maybe after talking to a bunch of pool cleaning companies you realize that there's a dire need for a phone app to track where cleaning crews are and what work they've done. They are more than happy to pay you since the app would save them thousands of dollars per year in various losses. After organically growing this business over time, you realize that other industry verticals with distributed workforces have a similar problem so you begin to expand and target larger businesses...you get the point.

My problem with the enterprise is that I see the problems my company has, but it's hard for me to gain any reasonable degree of certainty that existing solutions wouldn't solve our problems and aren't getting adopted by other companies.

The reason for this: many companies are bogged down in inertia, at least at many levels that aren't seen as directly driving growth. So when I see the horror that is our phone system (it's a horror) and I think "I bet we could run this shit through an iPad" and then see other solutions out there that are clearly better, where do I see how I would differentiate myself?

So it's only when you're in the enterprise, have a problem, get authorized to actually solve it (rare rare rare) and THEN actually experience available solutions falling short that you can start to figure out what you'd build and do differently.

In the consumer space we go through this every time we do anything: we are the masters of our iPhones. So when I want an iPhone app and it doesn't exist, I'm already 100% sure that I wanted that app and that it doesn't exist. Make sense?

Partner with someone who has got experience, enterprise generally depends more on deep expertise and network. You're also much more likely to need to get funding early on (whether from a VC or a client) and unless you have that expertise and network it's going to be very hard to get funded.

There's a guy on here - mindcrime - who's got a startup that's doing something like that. I think the company name is Fogbeam Labs or something to that effect. I'd look him up.

Steve Jobs mentioned this.

For enterprise software, user and buyer are not the same person.

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