
Ask HN: Integrating early-days startup with giant CRMs – like SAP? - r4pha
Hello everyone,<p>I&#x27;m a technical cofounder at a 6-ish months old startup. We do route planning and data collection for direct sales -- currently on a niche market.<p>We&#x27;ve been recently presented what seems like a potentially great opportunity from a big client. After some negotiation, we settled on an initial step that would be integrating our end-user app (for collecting data from the salesmen) to their CRM. This brings us to the present day.<p>I immediatelly started investigating ways to simply fetch data from their CRM (in this particular case, it was SAP), and right now I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of apparent complexity and how much locked-in and buzzwordy this ecossystem is. It worried me even more after reading Paul Graham&#x27;s essay [0], on which he says he&#x27;d never worry about competing startups working with Oracle (I&#x27;d probably put SAP in the same bag).<p>So, my question is: Does anyone have related experiences or advice to share with us? Here&#x27;s some added context:<p>- We&#x27;re bootstraped;<p>- We don&#x27;t pay rent;<p>- We don&#x27;t have employees beside the founders;<p>- We have only two technical people (me +1);<p>- We have two clients so far;<p>Thanks a lot in advance.<p>[0] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;avg.html
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dmilicevic
Sounds like that can easily turn into a never-ending business developing
and/or business intelligence project for the client you've mentioned. I assume
this is not what you want to achieve, otherwise you would be a cofounder at
CRM consultancy startup.

\- Be as specific as you can about the scope of data you will communicate
between and what exactly will be a part of this integration (try not to get
involved with anything other than that). \- Expect a lot of traffic as CRM's
tend to be loaded with useful and useless data which just keeps growing. \-
you can expect that your client will often want to increase the scope of data
fetched or sent to CRM. \- you can expect that your client will often want to
trash or change data fetched or sent to CRM.

All CRM's have out-of-the-box API which you will probably have to use, so look
into that. Usually you can CRUD a record in CRM by providing ID and type
values of that record.

Good luck!

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r4pha
Thanks for the insight. It's a relatively fragile negotiation, since we're
just little guys who received an opportunity to do business with a big corp.

As with the API, we implemented some integration with Salesforce and it was
relatively easy. SAP, on the other hand, seems to be a different kind of
beast. There's a huge amount of moving parts, which seems a little
enterprise-y and complex for a tiny startup to work with.

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alanorourke
I am not totally clear on your question. But instead on integrating directly
could you integrate your app with Zappier and use this?
[https://support.sapanywhere.com/confluence/sapkb/improving-y...](https://support.sapanywhere.com/confluence/sapkb/improving-
your-business/apps-integrations/sap-anywhere-app-store/zapier)

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r4pha
It seems like Zapier is some sort of task automation service, which works with
SAP Anywhere™ (which _seems_ to be yet another product from SAP). I'll look
further into it. Thanks!

