

Ask HN: Enterprise Start-ups? - captaincrunch

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.<p>That being said, how would an entrepreneur get into the enterprise without working for one, or with little or no experience with it?<p>What Ideas are out there for startups in the enterprise? (pg?)
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ianpri
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.

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alid
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! :)

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fawce
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...

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BjoernKW
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.

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mikepmalai
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.

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tomasien
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.

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tomasien
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?

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ig1
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.

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bartonfink
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.

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jsmartonly
Steve Jobs mentioned this.

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

