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Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#11

Post by 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

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…

Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#13

Post by nillium »

ggregoire wrote: post #11

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 Basically, b2b app = classic app + deep users management with Gmail SSO and/or CSV i…

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?

Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#14

Post by PirxThePilot »

ggregoire wrote: post #11

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 Basically, b2b app = classic app + deep users management with Gmail SSO and/or CSV i…

I've found this on HN, super useful indeed.

Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#15

Post by leesalminen »

nillium wrote: post #13
ggregoire wrote: post #11

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 Basically, b2b app = classic app + deep users management with Gmail SSO and/or CSV i…

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?

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#16

Post by ageyfman »

ggregoire wrote: post #11

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 Basically, b2b app = classic app + deep users management with Gmail SSO and/or CSV i…

This is great advice. I run a B2B SaaS and we were lucky enough to run bizdev and product dev paths in parallel, so we weren't stuck with the wrong product and no customers, instead, we had the customers to iterate on the wrong product to get to a better fit.

Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#17

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#18

Post by hectormalot »

leesalminen wrote: post #15
nillium wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 t…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What are your go-to blogs and books on building business applications?

#19

Post by phmagic »

ggregoire wrote: post #11

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 Basically, b2b app = classic app + deep users management with Gmail SSO and/or CSV i…

Are there API services that you can integrate with to accelerate the path to having all of the below? For example: Auth0 takes care of SSO.

Team Management Deployment Options Support/SLA Security Role-based Access Control Single Sign-On Integrations Reporting Audit Logging Product Assortment Change Management

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