[TheNewsIsHere]

That is a challenging balancing act, although worth it to work on mastering.

Technology is a particularly difficult place to balance those things.

When we opened our small business we took the marketing approach that (not the exact pitch) we “bring the best of enterprise” with the “agility” of not being an enterprise.

We don’t market like that anymore because it’s not a good fit for small business customers, but we still have a focus on that idea internally.

Balancing that with the realities of a small business are hard. For example, we have internally managed 3-2-1 backups of almost all customer data, replicated geographically, and persisted with credentials that can’t also mutate backup data. That is somewhat time consuming to manage on the front end.

I’ve written on HN before about how we suffered with QuickBooks and eventually moved to an ERP. Most businesses our size would scoff at that, but some things are worth the expense to integrate various processes into a single pipeline.

Part of the problem for SMBs is that you can’t scale your humans like you can scale your servers. So for every hour I spent connecting the dots, sending DocuSigns, and fighting with QB was an hour I couldn’t spend on product/service/customer. Sometimes you can buy your way out of that. Sometimes you can engineer your way out of that. Figuring out which is which is one of the hardest parts.

[JohnFen]

> we “bring the best of enterprise” with the “agility” of not being an enterprise.

If I read "best of enterprise", I'd wonder what was meant by that.

Broadly speaking, one of the big differences between large and small companies is what they're good at. The old saying that "small companies make it possible, large companies make it inexpensive" holds as true as always.

[TheNewsIsHere]

For us the meaning was market specific. We provide application hosting and consulting. Many of our customers came to us from other firms that clearly were run by people who did not understand the basics that an enterprise would expect. An example of this would be backups.

We had several customers jump to us from another local firm. When we got in, we noted that the prior firm had “implemented backups”. This was a script that just made a zip file of their data and stored it right alongside the running application. Sometimes even in a web/network accessible directory. But hey, most of our customers didn’t have backups before they came to us at all.

We’re also talking no MFA, guessable passwords, customer domain names owned by accounts associated with email addresses that no longer existed, etc.

So, stuff like that. I guess to sum it up you could say “we pay attention like an enterprise should,” and that many SMBs in the space don’t, for clients that don’t know what to pay attention to at all.

> The old saying that "small companies make it possible, large companies make it inexpensive" holds as true as always.

I hadn’t heard that. Love it. We don’t come cheap, but our clients don’t have to manage S3 buckets, and we don’t have to run geographically redundant SANs.