Building something to help manage clinical trials of drugs? Heck, you better have a ton of specialized expertise in the drug research vertical in one way or another.
Building a generalized platform that allows you to store legal records or other sensitive data in a secure and standardized fashion? Well, you might want to build custom sales plays based on individual verticals, but then you just hire a domain expert consultant to put the words in the right order and structure for that vertical.
One of the other benefits of the enterprise is that if you get the right enterprise, they will work with you to build your application. You have to find the right champion at the customer, someone with enough balls to take a risk, but basically you work out a deal:
- they will give you money for a product that barely works/barely exists today
- You will become their roadmap bitch for 12 months
- They will pay a comparatively cheap price for the software
There's a ton of risk associated there too - enterprises sometimes make irrational decisions that you're now bound to abide by, and it can make your product more of something custom as opposed to a general purpose application you want to sell.
However, it is a way to get an MVP out the door and get some money.
When three or four deals, with a 6 month lead time turned into an 18 month lead time, as things got pushed into next year, it meant we simply ran out of cash.
And with such a long and intensive sales cycle, we couldn't afford to have a large number of fallback leads at the same time.
With an Enterprise, you often have to sort through a huge pile of legacy and potentially unknown dependencies. Substantial existing hardware assets (mainframes, etc.); massive, valuable databases in obsolete, proprietary, or even flat-out badly-designed formats; internal processes or audit requirements that conflict with design ideals.
Once you're established though, the difficulty of creating an MVP becomes an advantage, because it makes it much harder for competitors to enter your space. If your product is an iPhone game, then a couple of college kids can compete with you. If your product is enterprise software, your competitors need to raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars just to have a chance to compete for your customers. The risk is that if your market segment becomes too large, it may attract competitors that are huge, well-funded companies like Microsoft or Oracle.
They copy once an idea shows traction, but having not done the legwork themselves, they won't necessarily understand why the idea was successful in the first place. This is why you see huge companies like that wasting tons of resources trying to catch up or, if they're smart, simply acquiring the team with the winning idea.
How does a 6 month sales cycle sound? What about expensive skilled sales reps?
- Selling costs are high.
- Sales cycles can be long.
- Harder to MVP and iterate.
- Domain expertise required.
I think the last one is the biggest challenge. To be successful with any product you need to understand the customer. Usually that means, you are the customer. With a consumer app, it's easier for you to be an example of the customer. With an enterprise app, you need to know that sort of enterprise -- its ostensible and implicit product needs, but also the decision-making processes and culture and so on.
As a result, you probably need to be an ex employee of that sort of company. Who became ex only after having been there long enough to understand the business and to make enough contacts at that company and its industry. And who became ex on sufficiently good parting terms.
So I would guess that's the "funnel" narrowing who can pull this off?