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I have a related question: Is high-touch saas (enterprise sales with long sales cycles) inherently harder to bootstrap than a low-touch saas business? I'm gues

I have a related question: Is high-touch saas (enterprise sales with long sales cycles) inherently harder to bootstrap than a low-touch saas business? I'm guessing the answer is something like "not if you have the network"

heipei 6y ago
I would say that in some ways its easier because you don't have to 100% polish your product page and explain everything your product does without leaving any open questions. Enterprise sales always has this concept of "let's set up a call so you can tell me everything that's already on the website", which at first seems annoying for us engineers, but actually it's really great because your prospective customers ask of lot of questions which makes you understand their background, their problems, their technical skills, etc. So instead of having to guess those things up-front, throw up a product and pricing page and just wait for signups, you can iteratively perfect your sales pitch, your product bundles, your pricing and really hone it in on your target audience. It's harder to bootstrap some customers who have a 6-months process with NDA, vendor db onboarding, compliance questionnaire, custom T&Cs, but other Enterprise customers are just as willing to send you five figures via credit card within a day or two of first contact. So these can bootstrap your business while you wait for the other deals to go through.
dman7 6y ago
In most scenarios, high-touch saas is harder to bootstrap. Your network will smooth out the friction of getting in the door, but there are other factors that make this hard to bootstrap: * Expensive headcount - high-touch sales requires sales, marketing and other GTM teams. Sales, especially, is very expensive. * Customizations - enterprise customers will want additional features above and beyond what your MVP offers. This will require additional engineering/product/design resources * Security audits - IT of the enterprise customer will want to see recent security audits which can range from $20K and up * Stability guarantees - enterprise customers are wary of offloading their workflow to small startups that might go belly up. Having guarantees, such as VC funding, will acquiesce them. A common path in B2B is to start with low-touch SaaS business (which is easier to bootstrap) & then move up-market.

heipei 6y ago

I would say that in some ways its easier because you don't have to 100% polish your product page and explain everything your product does without leaving any open questions. Enterprise sales always has this concept of "let's set up a call so you can tell me everything that's already on the website", which at first seems annoying for us engineers, but actually it's really great because your prospective customers ask of lot of questions which makes you understand their background, their problems, their technical skills, etc. So instead of having to guess those things up-front, throw up a product and pricing page and just wait for signups, you can iteratively perfect your sales pitch, your product bundles, your pricing and really hone it in on your target audience. It's harder to bootstrap some customers who have a 6-months process with NDA, vendor db onboarding, compliance questionnaire, custom T&Cs, but other Enterprise customers are just as willing to send you five figures via credit card within a day or two of first contact. So these can bootstrap your business while you wait for the other deals to go through.

dman7 6y ago

In most scenarios, high-touch saas is harder to bootstrap. Your network will smooth out the friction of getting in the door, but there are other factors that make this hard to bootstrap: * Expensive headcount - high-touch sales requires sales, marketing and other GTM teams. Sales, especially, is very expensive. * Customizations - enterprise customers will want additional features above and beyond what your MVP offers. This will require additional engineering/product/design resources * Security audits - IT of the enterprise customer will want to see recent security audits which can range from $20K and up * Stability guarantees - enterprise customers are wary of offloading their workflow to small startups that might go belly up. Having guarantees, such as VC funding, will acquiesce them. A common path in B2B is to start with low-touch SaaS business (which is easier to bootstrap) & then move up-market.