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by kurttheviking
3500 days ago
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Do you think the one-month horizon applies to enterprise products as well? If not, how does the metric change? In some industries a sales cycle lasts 18 months before culminating in a multi-million ARR contract. I'm curious given your experience with a database product that perhaps could have gone down that path. |
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The concern with new founders working on enterprise products is that it's very easy to convince yourself you're building for the enterprise when you really aren't. RethinkDB is case in point -- it's not the type of product you sell to a CIO (even with MongoDB, very few if any large organizations run on it -- it's mostly limited to silos). We found that we could capture at most $100k in value annually, and $1m contracts were ten years away.
My advice would be to either (a) not start enterprise companies unless you really know what you're doing, (b) start enterprise companies with consumer adoption models (Slack), or (c) if you must start an enterprise company, get really spectacular advisors who regularly spend enough time with you to understand your business intimately, and then listen to them.
[1] http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2014/10/five-ways-to-build...