Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications? - PirxThePilot
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ggregoire
Probably not the reply you are expecting, but as someone who built a b2b SaaS
and failed on the bizdev side, I'd suggest you to build the business before
building the application. In other words, get your first clients before coding
anything. It will save you time and money.

And to answer your question:
[https://www.enterpriseready.io](https://www.enterpriseready.io)

Basically, b2b app = classic app + deep users management with Gmail SSO and/or
CSV import and/or windows UAC integration (depends a lot of your target) +
deep roles/permissions management + integrations with existing apps/saas +
reports and alerting + automatic billing with Stripe or whatever.

Note that you can do most of those manually at the beginning. Send the reports
and the bills by email, add the new companies/users manually…

~~~
nillium
Curious, as someone who is in the early stages of planning a B2B SaaS company
-- can you talk any more to that? How do you get the clients without a product
to show them?

~~~
leesalminen
At Gingr (a B2B SaaS), we approached potential customers before writing a line
of code. The conversation focused on _their_ pain and how software can
alleviate it. After talking about _them_ , we asked if they’d be willing to
beta test what we built as a result of our conversations. About 80% said yes.
We beta tested and iterated for several months without asking for money. Once
everyone loved the product we asked them to pay- everyone was happy to. After
that we hired salespeople and opened up to the world.

~~~
hectormalot
Had almost the same experience. Someone came to us asking if we could build an
app, but wasn’t willing to pay full price. We decided to do it for a minimal
fee, but under the condition that they’d keep paying a monthly fee per user,
and now here we are with a b2b SaaS product and a few more paying customers
(it’s been passive income next to my day job for the last few years, revenue
allows us to buy new laptops every year, not new cars :)

On doing things manually: i send invoices once per year by hand (few hours of
work), do accounting in ledger for 1h once a quarter, and handle uncommon
requests directly in the DB (rails console is amazing for that, this happens
about once a month), but have automated password resets as we were getting too
many emails on those.

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superqwert
Technical concepts for writing code:

\--------------------------------------

Clean Code (Robert Cecil Martin)

The Art of Unit Testing (Roy Osherove)

Head First Design Patterns (Elisabeth Freeman, Kathy Sierra)

Martin Fowler's blog: [https://martinfowler.com/](https://martinfowler.com/)

.

How to gather requirements and write business-readable code:

\--------------------------------------

Domain-driven design (Eric J. Evans)

Implementing Domain-Driven Design (Vaughn Vernon)

Patterns, Principles, and Practices of Domain-Driven Design (Scott Millett)

.

Remaining agile and managing your work according to your clients' needs:

\--------------------------------------

The art of doing twice the work in half the time (Jeff Sutherland)

The Mythical Man Month (Fred Brooks)

~~~
nlawalker
Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vernon is fantastic. Extremely practical
application of the Evans book, which gets pretty abstract in places. It's
great for people who actually want to see where the rubber meets the road.

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seanperkins
I don't know if you are asking for how to actually develop the applications or
how to build the business that includes an application but my go to for
startup advice is Steve Blank
([https://steveblank.com/](https://steveblank.com/)). His stuff is easy to
understand and helps me work through some of the difficult problems of
creating a company from scratch.

------
drewmassey
\- how to start a startup podcast(Altman and co)

\- The lean startup

\- the twenty two immutable laws of marketing.

\- getting to yes

After a couple of books though I would say it really comes down to just
digging in and fighting it out. It is really easy to lose yourself in the
world of business self help literature.

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bootcode
Meta-answer, but indiehackers has a great podcast series with smaller-scale,
bootstrapped businesses.

The takeaways reflect much of the comments here. #1 is probably sell before
you build. Various refinements are:

\- Do consulting, and build a product once you see a pattern.

\- Do the service manually, and automate away the biggest bottleneck, one at a
time.

\- Do a landing page with signups, do content marketing while building the
stuff, so you have audience by the time you launch.

\- Do get on phone with prospective customers, don't just mail.

It is very very hard not to violate these, since of course our product is the
best.

Also, it's easy to spend more time reading about than actually doing.

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JustMatthew
Although it isn't a blog in the traditional sense - so forgive me if this
doesn't hit your brief - the Software Engineering Daily Podcast
([https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/podcast/](https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/category/podcast/))
is a fantastic resource that offers an immense amount of information for a lot
of different people, including those setting out to build business
applications.

Each episode is accompanied by super detailed show-notes that summarize the
episode nicely, so you can see if the episode has what you think you may be
looking for.

Cheers and good luck.

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kathrin____
[https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco](https://medium.com/@fairpixelsco) has been
very useful in gaining some insights in the design of business to business UX
and UI.

[https://startupsfortherestofus.com](https://startupsfortherestofus.com) is a
no brainer as well. Some of those podcasts are gems.

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haney
It might help if you could provide a bit more context. Is there an example
project you're working on? Is there a particular sector / type of business
you're interested in learning more about? Are you interested in the "process"
of business (finance/strategy/etc.)?

~~~
PirxThePilot
Mostly engineering and product management

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jonhearty
If you're building SaaS, I recommend the following for largely non-technical
content:

1\. SaaStr.com (blog) 2\. Behind the Cloud (book) 3\. Rework (book)

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kross
\- The goal

\- Running lean

------
parallel_item
Business Intelligence Roadmap by Moss and Atre

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nealmydataorg
At MyDataOrganizer we provide Low-Code platform to build business applications
as per your workflow requirements. Our blog at
[http://blog.MyDataOrganizer.com](http://blog.MyDataOrganizer.com) has useful
info. on building business applications.

