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Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

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Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#31

Post by jrvarela56 »

kasey_junk wrote: post #27
jrvarela56 wrote: post #22

Not to be dismissive, but if I were you, I would leave the technical aspects of a B2B/Enterprise product for later. The main problem is figuring out a sales process/gtm strategy. As others have mentioned, you would benefit from partnering with someone who knows about the problem/industry and has experience selling to enterprises. Keep in mind this will be the core competence of your company (if you want to make lots…

Note also that enterprises have extremely long and high touch sales cycles for most products. If you don’t know someone who has actually sold the kind of thing you are selling into an enterprise just figuring out who to talk to can take forever. Also once the sale lands, contracts and getting paid are their own challenges. You’ll have plenty of time to figure out SSO in the enterprise world if you can get to a sale.

Just to give a sense of how long these things take: you have to make the same presentation to the same people because it's been so many months they just forgot what you said the last time.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#33

Post by kcsavvy »

From someone who has built 2 successful enterprise apps as eng #1 (1 sold, 1 going strong today valued over 100M) and worked on others that failed, the ONLY thing to worry about now is whether or not your customers really want and need your app. 99% of enterprise saas products fail because of this, not because of a missing feature.

All the enterprise features like SSO, integrations, audit trails, etc can be built when a customer is asking for them — these are largely solved problems. These are probably attractive problems because they are engineering problems and you are an engineer.

Ignore them and focus on the business problem. “Does my app solve a burning need for my customers?”. Read “The Mom Test” to get in the mindset of answering that question. That is all that matters right now.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#34

Post by rst »

spapas82 wrote: post #29

Some things that I think are useful for an enterprise app: - Integrate with the organisation's authentication system, usually LDAP would suffice (sso is a plus but not really required) - Replicate the organisation's structure (directorates, departments, job titles, who reports to who etc). Some of this may be in LDAP but usually it is not enough and you need to integrate with another system like PeopleSoft - Auditing…

If you're SaaS, enterprise doesn't necessarily care what database you're using -- and some of them may be a polyglot even internally. (My dayjob is a SaaS that's old enough to have started on Oracle in part because we thought it would make us look "serious" to enterprise clients, which include some fairly large financial institutions. We just finally turned off the last Oracle server, after switching to Postgres; no one cared.)

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#35

Post by midenginedcoupe »

My 2p is understand what your target customers need from their suppliers in this area. Are they going to require ISO27001 certification before they even consider your product? Are you going to have to demonstrate robust business continuity procedures for them to take you seriously (e.g. are they going to really trust their critical processes to a single guy who could get run over tomorrow?) Is there legislation you have to demonstrate compliance against in their domains?

First of all, you have to work through these questions and validate your assumptions on all of them. Then you'll have a chance to spot ways of solving them. This is why a lot of startup products partner with large existing suppliers in the domain as you can piggyback of their reputation and operations. But without knowing your specific needs, you can't yet guage whether this approach would be right for you.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#36

Post by safeerm »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #10

I started a side project turned bootstrapped B2B SaaS that was eventually acquired, so I can share a bit of what I learned. Some day I’ll write up a longer list of lessons. Security - complexity will absolutely kill you. I know it’s fun to experiment with Kubernetes and multi-region infrastructure deployments, but that does nothing but increase your attack surface. When we were acquired, I had a single static website…

Good advice!

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#37

Post by el_zako »

cschmatzler wrote: post #7
code_runner wrote: post #6

If the smaller companies I’ve worked for are any indication… don’t get hung up on branding this app. Be able to swip swap a logo and call it a day. My god the time wasted talking about branding and then a client can’t even provide a decent logo and turns out they didn’t care about the branding anyways. Don’t waste your time on that stuff unless it’s hyper critical to the core product itself.

To add to this, I have an application in production with a client right now that literally doesn’t have a logo. The favicon is the initial of the service’s name on a random color background. Nobody has ever asked or commented.

I have a client who asked for the favicon to be changed 5 years after the app was in production.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#38

Post by fullstackchris »

jodoherty wrote: post #21
fullstackchris wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an alternative, if you containerize everything in the stack, you can simply spool up another seperate and isolated stack of containers for each given customer. Then it's also trivial if they want it 'on premise' somewhere or 'in the cloud'. No need to try and add complexity at the schema level and make a monolith support multiple tenants. Also, this list is quite literally supabase ( https://supabase.com/ ) - I ca…

I like this idea a lot, personally. Separately deployed customer instances as an approach for “multi-tenancy” also eliminates the need for sharding databases at scale, since most of your scaling will just be new deployments. Overall, this suggestion has an appealing set of trade offs if you have the DevOps chops to pull it off. Just watch out for really really big customer instances (but then they should be paying mo…

I realized after commenting if it is specifically a product where you actually need / want these customers' data to "talk" to eachother, then actually your architecture might be a bit simpler - then you can expose what you need between all the tenants. I can't speak to this approach much more though, since I haven't done a project like that yet.

Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?

#40

Post by vishnugupta »

I was heading tech and product of a SAAS software for ~15 months so writing this from that experience.

- Who is the buyer? Typically they are not same as the user of the product so understand what they look for in similar products.

- SSO, preferably SAML based.

- As for security, take care of OWASP top-10 [1] and you should be covered for app-sec.

- Implement RBAC. Make it easy to add/manage users for an admin-user.

- Setup a demo account in sandbox, fill it with data as close to real world as possible. Makes it super easy during sale pitch. You let your product talk instead of you.

- Consider multi-tenancy from right off the bat. It's hard to add it later.

- Look up your domain specific compliance requirements and build those from ground up. Some such as SOC 2 don't hurt. While at it, get a decent security vendor to pen-test your product, work with them to fix high/medium priority issues and get them to issue certificate. It builds credibility with customers.

- Reports. Typically the admins will require a bunch of reports. It's best to give them a CSV/Excel download and let them slice and dice in their spread sheet software.

- Users will make mistakes so always use soft-delete. You can always do hard-delete after a few months.

[1] https://owasp.org/Top10/

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