[Roritharr]

The main problem of enterprise startups isn't to find the right problem-domain but rather the sheer amount of work power it needs to find and solve the edge cases. Big Co uses a lot of Custom Software for a reason... The bigger it gets, the more custom solutions they use. SAP and Oracle employ a boatload of people just for that reason.

If you're interested in enterprise startups you should start looking for a really specialised piece of workflow that is common among huge company's and try to solve that in its entirety better than the existing solution.

[count]

Most large enterprises are aware of this (hell, they sometimes consider their 'uniqueness' a competitive advantage). If your product is MOST of the way there, and you're willing to engage the enterprise appropriately, they'll usually fund the development of the edge case support for their unique situation.

This breaks the pure SaaS model though, as they'll probably not want their pieces given to their competitors.

[Dylanlacey]

I don't think "sometimes" covers it. Almost every medium to large enterprise I've come across considered some/all aspects of their custom software solutions to be a business advantage, even when they weren't applicable to their customers at all.

Everyone wants to be special, and it's a very compelling internal narrative, that your stupid/wasteful/annoying/irrelevant processes (and thus software) is actually a strength.

[mattmanser]

You'd be surprised. A company I worked for used to cost it out and offer a 50/50 fund of the dev costs if they thought they could resell it.

A fair few businesses took up the offer. Essentially they're paying to bump up functionality in the dev cycle that we'd eventually get round to, but maybe years away still.

[Evbn]

Your two paragraphs seem to contradict each other.

[Roritharr]

Not really. I specifically talked about a very specialised piece of the workflow, which is different from tackling a problem that is larger and has a lot of edge cases.