Building an enterprise startup

Boydlee Pollentine, Tipsy & Tumbler Ltd

www.tipsyandtumbler.co.uk

@boydleep

KLassAPP

1.
Money

2.
PEOPLE

a broad range of skills

Sales
Industry Knowledge
Technical Ability

Don't pretend to know what you don't. The right team of people is absolutely critical.

3.
know your market.

Don't fool yourself

Every business has its own Key Performance Indicators. Find it & master it!
Take a deep dive into the business work flow and understand the pain points & profit centres.
Too often you’ll find solutions that merely presents data from ERP systems with some basic communication elements in the App. THIS IS A POOR SOLUTION & POOR BARRIER OF ENTRY!

Not EVERY industry is ready

We are living in a very exciting time. When you start thinking of the power an Enterprise Mobile Solution and the potential efficiency gain, almost every business and industry could benefit from it.

Do you research…some industries may not be ready to adopt, such as industries with working environments that aren't conducive to mobile use or have poor network coverage (oil rigs, etc).

Complex system - simple usage

Understanding of the KPIs and pain points will allow you to build a complex / sophisticated solution, but with Simple UI/UX

4.
GET OUT THERE AND SELL IT.

An enterprise solution is not twitter or facebook or pinterest

You need to have a plan to generate income and be profitable
No point building the greatest app in the world if you do not have the ability or channel to market, sell and be profitable
More targeted sales strategy rather than mass advertising.
Online popularity does not equate to actual sales

5.
HAVE A HOOK.

5.
don't sweat the small stuff.

6.
CHOOSING THE RIGHT INFRASTRUCTURE

FREE & OPENSOURCE

Make sure any open source products you're using have a good track history (i.e. active on GitHub) or if provided by a company have support channels.

Eventually, all good things come to an end and that includes "free" API's and services. Beware!

PAID SERVICES

SaaS products can help you get off the ground but be careful of being permanently tied-in.

Cloud products can help you get off the ground quickly and effeciently.

Don't go for lowest common denominator. Support and service is just as important as price.

7.
choosing the right technology stack

beware - subjective!

Almost certainly half the audience is going to disagree with me, but here we go anyway...

the choice of technology stack should be governed by three things:

How long the technology has been around, and who else is using it.
Your level of comfort and understanding of it.
How easy it is to get support and developers capable in it.

beware the easy road to Scaling

or why we now completely avoid all variants of Mbaas, Baas, etc.

your solution is not scalable if:

You have an arbitrary API call threshold imposed upon you,
You cannot provide advanced searching functionality
You can not dynamically generated "apps" or database containers
You're completely at the whim of the MBaaS provider when it comes to backup and restoration processes.

There is no point building a lamborghini only to find you can't drive it.

choosing a database

beware the Nosql bandwagon.

Is the client / users going to want to do reporting?

Is the client / users going to want sophisticated searching?

what we got right

titanium application development has meant less cost, less maintenance and features are updated on a 1:1 basis

A solid build process is essential

especially if you're building a white-labelled solution. we branch all college apps in git so they can be easily merged whilst retaining individual assets.

8.
integration services

in an enterprise, integration with third party software and services will be a necessary

API's, API's, API's!

Be prepared to have to get creative with integration
Be prepared to wade through some pretty shit software
You will be more prepared if you have taken the API FIRST approach to development.

9.
maintaining what you've built

bug fixing, Maintenance

Make sure you have resources available who understand the product from the inside out. Maintenance and bug fixing are paramount. Your solution is likely to change and the codebase grow so documentation is a key factor.

support

Get a good support line working early. We use Freshdesk for simple ticket submission and tracking which only costs a few dollars a month.

client relationship building

you (or your client) will need to handhold those initial customers and be prepared to spend a lot of time helping with product direction and integration

10.
perfection

Perfection is a good trait… but in building an app

THE Mobile industry moves too fast to wait for the Perfect App / Solution

Strategy:

Break up your concept into phases for development and rollout
Let your pilot clients help make your product better
Address the core KPIs, leave the bells and whistles for later
Don’t build everything in house. Leverage others technology