Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

Look at a lot of big traditional B2B businesses. They haven't gotten much coverage because they aren't sexy and visible to the normal consumer.

- ERP ssystems are impossible to understand for the people that work with them, and require an army of highly paid consultants just to get it up and running.

- financial software for large companies doesn't allow managers to see numbers in real-time, is difficult to get numbers in and out of, and hard to use.

- HR software for managing people, their interests, knowledge, track record, etc. in large companies.

These are just a few examples off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more.

The advantage of B2B software is that you have a very good income model. A SAP ERP system for a company with 1000 employees runs into the millions. There are customers out there willing to pay you by the bucketload if you can make something that doesn't suck. And most of what is on the market today sucks badly.

This is an industry that has been resting on its laurels for many years, and is ready to be picked off by nimble competitors.

Right you are, but you'll find that even though you've got the technical and design chops to blow the current systems out of the water, the sales cycle for these large corporations are pretty long.

Part of the problem is that when things cost beyond a certain amount they need approval. With approval comes delays and red tape. You'll have to have some sort of pricing and buy-in strategy for you to be able to get the large company to buy your stuff if that's the case.

If you can manage that, then by all means, go kick ass.

Never said it was easy ;-)

But you're absolutely right - the sales cycle is very different. Not only do you have looong lead-times, but you also have to understand all the corporate bullshit, and weird decisions that get made based on the sometimes irrational behaviour of big corporations.

But if you do it right you can make big-corp pay for your development. If you sell it well some companies will give you the opportunity to sell them something you have yet to make, and that they full-well know will make your company very profitable. Nix the VC, go straight to the customer, and make them pay up front.

I remember asking a friend who wrote software why it cost what it did. Their answer $20k is the amount an average middle manager can sign off without running it up the chain.

This is an area that has huge potential. The problem is that the scale is beyond the capabilities of the small startup. I'm involved in something that might have the right model. My client acquired some quite capable, but rough around the edges, software from a supplier that went belly up. The intention is to fix the bugs, enable low cost (non-programmer) customization and spin it off as a separate company. There may be other opportunities out there to take good enterprise software public.

The other approach is to take on a narrow vertical and do a bangup job, Grow from there.

For the purpose of disruption, which vertical?

Well lets try to answer the question then. The classic disruption model requires cases of 'non-consumption' to start consuming the alternative product.

Who just can't afford/manage ERP but could use it? I think there are a bunch in this sphere.

More than just "doesn't suck" -- you need to be able to save people money from pretty much day 1.

I'm hiring people in this space if anyone is looking for a job.

In the B2B space? That doesn't exactly narrow things down.

I was counting on anyone interested to click on the link to my company in my profile, which goes right to a home page focused on financial software for businesses...

True. But I would highly recommend that you consider "how to sell a B2B product" before considering legacy segments like ERP. Its non-trivial to build a new product from scratch in these spaces but there is an opportunity to build SaaS version of ERP products for small and mid-market customers. See these examples: http://www.coupa.com and http://www.nurturehq.com. Both are good products with large markets, are completely hosted and don't involve any legacy integrations which can be a killer.

However, all such products do require a systematic sales team/plan/process including inbound/outbound/inside sales kind of approaches to build revenue.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com