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Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

colmanhumphrey.com

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Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#51

Post by sirspacey »

This is such an excellent reflection, especially the iterative nature.

“Yes but” is now a part of my toolkit to help me authentically unpack all the justifications that come to mind & convert them into learning.

I’ve lead B2B SaaS revenue efforts a number of times. You correctly identified all the things that are hard and how customer size is a major factor in choosing what to build and how to sell.

My general recommendation for a tool like yours is to sell to the professional who would use it in a “b2b2c” format like Slack.

First win the champion, then the market they live in.

Excited to see what you choose next!

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#52

Post by rKarpinski »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #50
rKarpinski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EDIT: A key lesson learned for technical founders seeking co-founders where your target market is enterprise/B2B SaaS: the best non-technical candidates don't want to take the risk in a startup (because they are already making bank with enterprise sales) and most candidates that want to do a startup probably aren't the best candidates (because otherwise, they'd be making bank doing enterprise sales for an incumbent…

That's more or less what I wrote in my last sentence, right? (that you left off...) > It's really needle in the haystack that you find the right non-technical partner that can sell into an industry and is motivated by entrepreneurship. The right candidate with the right mindset is very hard to find.

> The right candidate with the right mindset is very hard to find.

Yeah strongly agree but I also think you are looking in the wrong place.

What I disagree with is the notion that the best co-founder is hard to find because they are doing well in the corporate world. Building a business is a very different problem and environment, and it requires different adaptations. The playbook of an enterprise AE is often counter productive that early; in the same way that implementing amazon/google scale tools and infra are on the technical side [that early].

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#53

Post by magicalhippo »

vosper wrote: post #37
CharlieDigital wrote: post #9

> Distribution Incredibly hard with B2B/enterprise SaaS, even if you solve a problem that they have. Across three different startup efforts, I've learned that even if some team loves the product: 1) legal/compliance/IT team gets involved and kills it for a handful of common reasons, 2) it addresses a key part of their workflow, but the primary process exists in some *other* system so they are not willing to add a new…

> 1) legal/compliance/IT team gets involved and kills it for a handful of common reasons What are the common reasons and why can't they be dealt with? There are platforms like WorkOS that (supposedly) make it easy to do compliance stuff.

Besides WorkOS being stupid expensive as far as I can see, the compliance requests we get goes far beyond that.

It includes our development practices, internal security, who has physical access to stuff and so on. And it's never the same, and they usually won't do any work themselves so we have to figure out how our situation maps to their 2000 custom questions.

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#54

Post by hkgjjgjfjfjfjf »

magicalhippo wrote: post #53
vosper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) legal/compliance/IT team gets involved and kills it for a handful of common reasons What are the common reasons and why can't they be dealt with? There are platforms like WorkOS that (supposedly) make it easy to do compliance stuff.

Besides WorkOS being stupid expensive as far as I can see, the compliance requests we get goes far beyond that. It includes our development practices, internal security, who has physical access to stuff and so on. And it's never the same, and they usually won't do any work themselves so we have to figure out how our situation maps to their 2000 custom questions.

Or you quit excusing your half assed practices, put on your big boy pants and do the work to get ISO270001 certification

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#55

Post by magicalhippo »

louthy wrote: post #36
thenobsta wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear more insights about on this. I'm just kicking off a B2B SaaS, have a rough idea of the checklist in my head, and am trying to balance core tech development with box checking.

GDPR & ISO27001 compliance are the important ones, but depending on the industry there maybe others (HIPAA for example). You need to hire an advisor and start writing everything down. Being able to hand over compliance documentation along with proof of an audit is absolute gold. If you don’t do this, be prepared for a mini-audit on every sale (if you get that far). Sales to governments will likely come with even more…

> If you don’t do this, be prepared for a mini-audit on every sale (if you get that far).

That's the position we're in, though as an older but still growing B2B we have to do this for existing customers as well.

We're in the process of getting ISO27001, meanwhile we got one guy out of 40ish almost full-time answering such questions now.

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#56

Post by 8note »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #49
vosper wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) legal/compliance/IT team gets involved and kills it for a handful of common reasons What are the common reasons and why can't they be dealt with? There are platforms like WorkOS that (supposedly) make it easy to do compliance stuff.

Depending on the industry, once legal and compliance get involved, you can face a number of obstacles. Regulatory compliance like HIPAA, SOC2 is a common one (most small startups I've seen can bullshit their way around this for a bit); many early stage startups won't have this in place since it requires a not-insignificant investment in time and money. Some industries like life sciences will request external/3rd part…

This sounds like a business opportunity, for selling to VCs to recommend to their startups

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#57

Post by tyrw »

DylanSp wrote: post #30
tyrw wrote: post #19

> Large companies didn’t want it enough to deal with our lack of “big company features” (enterprise SSO, compliance certifications... > We spent a bunch of time on multi-tenant infrastructure... I'm in a position where I talk to SaaS businesses all day about both of these. Probably over 1,000 at this point. We help a lot of these companies add the enterprise features they need, but it's often a shame to hear they're…

Question about multi-tenancy - do you recommend starting with a single-tenant approach, or are there off-the-shelf options for multi-tenancy that you'd recommend using, instead of building it from scratch?

We build a system that is multi-tenant capable but can run as single tenant until you need it. Happy to chat if helpful

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#58

Post by marcus_holmes »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #9

> Distribution Incredibly hard with B2B/enterprise SaaS, even if you solve a problem that they have. Across three different startup efforts, I've learned that even if some team loves the product: 1) legal/compliance/IT team gets involved and kills it for a handful of common reasons, 2) it addresses a key part of their workflow, but the primary process exists in some *other* system so they are not willing to add a new…

Agree completely, and I'd add that the sales cycle for a large enterprise customer can be a killer too. Generally speaking, for a large organisation, getting from a product demo to a purchase order takes two years. This can be an absolute killer for startup cashflow - you need to keep an active sales presence with the customer for that entire time, doing regular meetings and presentations, before you'll see a cent from them [0].

The advantage is that they're generally not price-sensitive, and much less willing to switch to a competitor.

[0] I make this point every time I talk to a founder who plans on bootstrapping in this space, and their usual answer is that this won't take that long for them because $reason. It always takes this long.

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#59

Post by tyrw »

thenobsta wrote: post #27
tyrw wrote: post #19

> Large companies didn’t want it enough to deal with our lack of “big company features” (enterprise SSO, compliance certifications... > We spent a bunch of time on multi-tenant infrastructure... I'm in a position where I talk to SaaS businesses all day about both of these. Probably over 1,000 at this point. We help a lot of these companies add the enterprise features they need, but it's often a shame to hear they're…

I'd love to hear more insights about on this. I'm just kicking off a B2B SaaS, have a rough idea of the checklist in my head, and am trying to balance core tech development with box checking.

Sorry I got busy today (more convos!). I'd be happy to chat or email and try to be helpful -- if you want you can check my bio.

Re: Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

#60

Post by tyrw »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #44
tyrw wrote: post #19

> Large companies didn’t want it enough to deal with our lack of “big company features” (enterprise SSO, compliance certifications... > We spent a bunch of time on multi-tenant infrastructure... I'm in a position where I talk to SaaS businesses all day about both of these. Probably over 1,000 at this point. We help a lot of these companies add the enterprise features they need, but it's often a shame to hear they're…

"build multi-tenancy themselves".... this is a weird thing to say. In the modern day, what product company builds single-tenancy..? Even if a customer explicitly wants it, you can make multi into single easily. The other way around is difficult.

Depends on the app and the context. A lot of apps need multi-tenant access control but not necessarily separate containers etc. In those cases, "adding" multi-tenancy means maintaining an Organizations table, a Roles table, and a table to map them to Users.
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