For the non technical side, depending on the size and nature of your clients, you may want to consider certain compliance requirements. Such as GDPR, ISO, and SOC.
Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
81–90 of 132 posts
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#82If you are alone, consider taking on someone for sales and finance. Selling to large businesses is a long, slow, drawn-out process, with much "paperwork" and an endless array of reasons for meetings. On your own you'll have no time to do actual dev or design work!
This is one of the reasons I'd probably never go solo unless I had little or no choice. I've seen it up close in a small (5 to 7 people) company selling to enterprise and from further away (I very rarely interact directly with clients & prospects at all these days) as part of a larger company (in both cases working on software to manage T&C and other regulatory requirements, mainly for public facing investment banks and insurance vendors), and I would find it infinitely infuriating.
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#83I 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.…
This is a really solid reply - I would emphasize “know your buyer.”
We thought we had a solution to a problem. We were told from the end users we had a solution to the problem. We thought we knew the value to those people as far as pricing for the product. But the actual buyer didn’t at all value our product the way the end user did, especially when factoring switching costs etc and it was crippling.
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclosure: I work for an auth service vendor. Great feedback about knowing who the buyer is. Lots of folks think about the user, but knowing the buyer (and they are usually not the same person) is critical too. If you are a building a SaaS, I'd recommend outsourcing your auth, since that is both critical and undifferentiated functionality. There are lots of solutions out there. FusionAuth is one option (I work there…
IMO https://ory.sh has completely changed this calculation. With the help of Ory Kratos it makes sense to roll your own auth.
Do you mean to use Ory Kratos in a self-hosted manner? From a brief look it seems like you aren't rolling your own auth when you use this, but rather integrating it into your application.
What am I missing?
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#85The #1 thing you should be worried about is sales.
I wouldn’t be too worried about things like SSO, that’s extremely well-tread territory for thousands of Saas founders so getting advice won’t be hard.
If it’s not a bottoms-up, self serve Saas product I’d be almost 100% focused on finding the proper decision makers (who also have budget at their disposal) at enterprise orgs and talking to them first before building.
Once you have a repeatable strategy for successfully getting the attention of the correct decision-maker types, THEN I’d worry about all the implementation details. Otherwise you don’t have a business.
This is harder than it looks because the people with real spending authority also typically have full calendars.
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#86From 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 whe…
Adding to this:
First thing should not be finding out what what your customers want.
First thing should be finding out IF THERE EVEN ARE CUSTOMERS for your product.
A product idea that doesn't have any market won't be successful. So find out if there are people who have a problem that can be solved, then try to solve that problem. Additionally the problem has to be annoying enough so people are willing to pay to make it go away. If you have those two, it's a great start.
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#87I 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.…
Disclosure: I work for an auth service vendor. Great feedback about knowing who the buyer is. Lots of folks think about the user, but knowing the buyer (and they are usually not the same person) is critical too. If you are a building a SaaS, I'd recommend outsourcing your auth, since that is both critical and undifferentiated functionality. There are lots of solutions out there. FusionAuth is one option (I work there…
I'm not entirely sure I agree with this - most auth providers are very expensive, and if you don't need the full-featured offering, you are way overpaying for the engineering time to build your replacement.
If you need all the features, it's a good deal, but you rarely do unless you are building something like Notion or Jira.
Open source components (Ory) can do the basic cryptography, and if you go completely from scratch, the NIST and their European counterparts have well-written standards for how to do this, and if you follow the relevant parts of the standard, you will get something essentially perfect without the baggage.
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#88Build your app to expose APIs and then have your web client consume those APIs by doing client side rendering. No need to worry about having to do server side rendering for SEO in the enterprise space!
Often in enterprise after people use your app, they want to automate things themselves, or integrate your app into some other system. Having APIs means there's no extra work. Anything they can do in the app, they can also automate.
If there's a database involved, having a read replica that your users can access can help them answer any business question very quickly. Many business people, report writers, engineers, etc.. are very well versed in SQL, and often your app is just the gate keeper to ensure the database is updated correctly. The database is the real 'state of the company' that everyone is constantly querying for answers. As well as putting reporting layers on top of such as Excel, Tableau and Power BI.
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO https://ory.sh has completely changed this calculation. With the help of Ory Kratos it makes sense to roll your own auth.
Do you mean to use Ory Kratos in a self-hosted manner? From a brief look it seems like you aren't rolling your own auth when you use this, but rather integrating it into your application. What am I missing?
Kratos is not a complete Auth solution - if you self host you still need to write your own UI. We built another layer over it to handle RBAC and organization management. But at least Kratos covers all the complex crypto and security items related to authentication (not authorization, which I consider to be a part of “auth” writ large).
Re: Ask HN: Main things to consider when building an app for business/enterprise?
#90I 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.…
I wasn't familiar with the acronym RBAC (but certainly familiar with the concept) until web searching for it. First link was from solarwinds.. nope, found an okta link.. yep! Thanks for the well thought out list this was helpful
Since I had the same experience just now, it seems useful to post the answer here.
In computer systems security, role-based access control (RBAC) or role-based security is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users. It is an approach to implement mandatory access control (MAC) or discretionary access control (DAC).