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Going after large enterprise sales is a well known trap, and it's just so easy for a startup to spin its wheels for months, and eventually years, and realize th

Going after large enterprise sales is a well known trap, and it's just so easy for a startup to spin its wheels for months, and eventually years, and realize that all the efforts got nowhere. The first 1B+ seller is precisely the hardest: Even when you are a relatively well known company, you'll still see reticence in bids if they know you are going to be their biggest costumer by volume. The companies I know that succeeded with that strategy either have great starting relationships with insiders in their first sales, and had contracts signed before committing to a big staff, or got into said companies when they were small: If one of your customers turns into a rocket ship and you are tied to their revenue stream, their growth is your enterprise-sized company. Enterprise sales might not even be all that profitable when it's all said and done: How many other companies are going to try to bid on their business? With their large size, how good is their leverage to squeeze down the profits of the winning bid. You might have a relatively unique product, the right connections, and end up being Palantir, but it's a very narrow road with steep cliffs everywhere.

lowkey_ 5y ago
But didn't Bolt succeed (order of magnitudes more revenue) by taking those enterprise customers while Fast was only getting SMBs? I'm currently at a seed-stage startup with a few Fortune 500 companies as users. We're lucky to have a great sales team that can bring that business in. If we're solving a problem for them, they're willing to use us regardless of our size, though they do care about some small particular issues around size.
- danielmarkbruce 5y ago
  If you can get them, that's awesome. Which company?
  - marketerinland 5y ago
    Quick comment on this. I also work for a seed level startup and we have gotten dozens of Fortune 500s, plus most of the big accounting, auditing and consulting firms. The reason this is possible for us is because our tech isn’t mission critical for them. I doubt the CEOs/CXOs of any of these companies even know we exist. We’ve just been fortunate that a lot of ops teams in these companies need our thing. So - that has really changed my paradigm of enterprise sales. Sometimes, if you’re SAP, you need to get whole of company buy-in. But if you’re SurveyMonkey, you don’t
    - danielmarkbruce 5y ago
      Yep, totally. I wasn't even surprised tbh. It's just a good thing and it takes a good ceo/early sales person to get those deals even if they aren't mission critical.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  I work for a competitor to Bolt (and Fast) though not in one-click checkout. To say "Bolt Succeeded" is premature IMO. The federated checkout space is very crowded, with razor-thin margins and huge competitors. If I was going to pick a winner it would be Apple or another org with their network and leverage. Bolt is definitely doing better than Fast ever did by several magnitudes, but still not profitable (though that doesn't seem to matter these days).
  - lupire 5y ago
    How is Bolt more than just your browser's saved credit card feature?
    - samhw 5y ago
      I was going to start a business in this space, and I can sum it up as broadly this: - It saves all the details needed for 1-click, not only your card (which is just PayPal). So: shipping address, name, possibly even 'pre-done' age or fraud checks, etc. - It 'maps to' the business's API far better than a browser's autofill can do, which only has some random HTML tags and a helluva lot of guessing. (In other words, users won't have to keep filling in the, like, 4 out of 9 inputs that it didn't understand.) Your advantage is that the merchant itself does the integration work themselves - though ideally your API/SDK will make that as easy as possible. (Essentially, it's just: "user has a third-party cookie for your site, comparable to SSO, and you charge their saved details and call the merchant's API on the backend [or, for small businesses, a Shopify integration or whatever fresh hell the Fast engineers must've gone through]".) It's an enormous potential market, though that's also true of the shipping industry and it doesn't guarantee big margins. I'm interested to see what comes of it all. I expect something boring like "Yeah, eventually [company X] got big enough, that's why Apple released the Apple Pay Checkout Fields API for JS". As a footnote: Amazon has actually offered this as a service for ages, which I know because of the precisely one website I used which happened to offer it. If it weren't for the terrible antediluvian UX and the lack of any evident marketing, it probably wouldn't have been such an open goal for these startups. Here, this is what Fast was trying to sell a shittier version of, without a user base: https://pay.amazon.com/what-is-amazon-pay https://pay.amazon.com/what-is-amazon-pay
skrtskrt 5y ago
Yeah I’ve worked places where the product was clearly superior to competitors in every possible way, including price, but selling to anyone beyond a small business was still VERY tough for multitude of reasons. You would have companies where you have existing relationships, they love what you offer, and really want to work with you, but the deal just gets delayed by some other priority or reality of their business. The solution they already have is good enough (even if it’s barely good enough), and sticking with it is not actively putting them out of business for the time being. It’s just reality… just like VC investing, selling into 100 small companies and growing along with some of them is waaaaay more likely to pay off than landing one whale
querulous 5y ago
i worked for a startup with a promising product in a lucrative niche but rather than invest in their unique value propositions and use that as a sales ratchet they instead pursued a sales strategy of "outsourced IT" at below cost. engineering time was devoured by integration issues and custom work for customers that were paying far less than the cost of the custom work

lowkey_ 5y ago

But didn't Bolt succeed (order of magnitudes more revenue) by taking those enterprise customers while Fast was only getting SMBs? I'm currently at a seed-stage startup with a few Fortune 500 companies as users. We're lucky to have a great sales team that can bring that business in. If we're solving a problem for them, they're willing to use us regardless of our size, though they do care about some small particular issues around size.

danielmarkbruce 5y ago
If you can get them, that's awesome. Which company?
- marketerinland 5y ago
  Quick comment on this. I also work for a seed level startup and we have gotten dozens of Fortune 500s, plus most of the big accounting, auditing and consulting firms. The reason this is possible for us is because our tech isn’t mission critical for them. I doubt the CEOs/CXOs of any of these companies even know we exist. We’ve just been fortunate that a lot of ops teams in these companies need our thing. So - that has really changed my paradigm of enterprise sales. Sometimes, if you’re SAP, you need to get whole of company buy-in. But if you’re SurveyMonkey, you don’t
  - danielmarkbruce 5y ago
    Yep, totally. I wasn't even surprised tbh. It's just a good thing and it takes a good ceo/early sales person to get those deals even if they aren't mission critical.
skeeter2020 5y ago
I work for a competitor to Bolt (and Fast) though not in one-click checkout. To say "Bolt Succeeded" is premature IMO. The federated checkout space is very crowded, with razor-thin margins and huge competitors. If I was going to pick a winner it would be Apple or another org with their network and leverage. Bolt is definitely doing better than Fast ever did by several magnitudes, but still not profitable (though that doesn't seem to matter these days).
- lupire 5y ago
  How is Bolt more than just your browser's saved credit card feature?
  - samhw 5y ago
    I was going to start a business in this space, and I can sum it up as broadly this: - It saves all the details needed for 1-click, not only your card (which is just PayPal). So: shipping address, name, possibly even 'pre-done' age or fraud checks, etc. - It 'maps to' the business's API far better than a browser's autofill can do, which only has some random HTML tags and a helluva lot of guessing. (In other words, users won't have to keep filling in the, like, 4 out of 9 inputs that it didn't understand.) Your advantage is that the merchant itself does the integration work themselves - though ideally your API/SDK will make that as easy as possible. (Essentially, it's just: "user has a third-party cookie for your site, comparable to SSO, and you charge their saved details and call the merchant's API on the backend [or, for small businesses, a Shopify integration or whatever fresh hell the Fast engineers must've gone through]".) It's an enormous potential market, though that's also true of the shipping industry and it doesn't guarantee big margins. I'm interested to see what comes of it all. I expect something boring like "Yeah, eventually [company X] got big enough, that's why Apple released the Apple Pay Checkout Fields API for JS". As a footnote: Amazon has actually offered this as a service for ages, which I know because of the precisely one website I used which happened to offer it. If it weren't for the terrible antediluvian UX and the lack of any evident marketing, it probably wouldn't have been such an open goal for these startups. Here, this is what Fast was trying to sell a shittier version of, without a user base: https://pay.amazon.com/what-is-amazon-pay https://pay.amazon.com/what-is-amazon-pay

skrtskrt 5y ago

Yeah I’ve worked places where the product was clearly superior to competitors in every possible way, including price, but selling to anyone beyond a small business was still VERY tough for multitude of reasons. You would have companies where you have existing relationships, they love what you offer, and really want to work with you, but the deal just gets delayed by some other priority or reality of their business. The solution they already have is good enough (even if it’s barely good enough), and sticking with it is not actively putting them out of business for the time being. It’s just reality… just like VC investing, selling into 100 small companies and growing along with some of them is waaaaay more likely to pay off than landing one whale

querulous 5y ago

i worked for a startup with a promising product in a lucrative niche but rather than invest in their unique value propositions and use that as a sales ratchet they instead pursued a sales strategy of "outsourced IT" at below cost. engineering time was devoured by integration issues and custom work for customers that were paying far less than the cost of the custom work