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YC: Requests for Startups

(www.ycombinator.com)
514 points sarimkx | 1 comments | 14 Feb 24 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.997s | source
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brettv2 ◴[14 Feb 24 15:54 UTC] No.39371339[source]▶
> NEW ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING SOFTWARE

Very curious if anyone knows how to pull this off. There's so much value to be unlocked but it's just impossible to break through.

I've personally met three very talented founders that tried and failed (one was accepted to YC as a mid-market ERP and successfully pivoted into an application tracking system) and failed very quickly.

I'm guessing an important feature would be an integration system that maps data from the current ERP seamlessly into the new ERP. And that assumes you can even get through the enterprise sales process to even get the company to migrate.

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ibash ◴[14 Feb 24 16:05 UTC] No.39371513[source]▶
I’ve met a few people who’ve been on the buyer side of an erp migration. It’s a multi million dollar affair that takes years.

Two approaches I can think of:

1. Target mid market or smaller and grow with customers (will be slow)

2. Take a front-door-wrapper approach

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samsolomon ◴[14 Feb 24 18:37 UTC] No.39373429[source]▶
Or 3. Target a small slice of ERP/CRM tooling and gradually evolve into something more fully-featured.
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SteveNuts ◴[14 Feb 24 18:42 UTC] No.39373488[source]▶
The problem is ERP needs to be incredibly tightly integrated into the whole business from end-to-end.

You can't only offer raw materials tracking, but not accounting and shipping. There's just not a lot of value to the business unless you have everything coupled.

The MVP for an ERP is essentially, a fully featured and battle-tested system which is very expensive and time consuming to build before it's profitable.

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1. eitally ◴[14 Feb 24 19:51 UTC] No.39374349[source]▶
That's strictly true for standard definitions of ERP, but it's a rare enterprise that doesn't already have adjacent software they've licensed to specifically support parts of their business. This could be freight & logistics, or warehouse management/inventory, or QA/Test, or RMA, or whatever. Convincing someone to move away from Oracle or SAP is a nonstarter for a startup. It worked several years ago for Netsuite, which advertised itself as the first "cloud native ERP" and was widely lauded for being so much more easily customizable than Oracle (so Oracle bought them in 2016).

I don't think starting a new ERP company from scratch makes sense for anyone. The best you would likely do is to become either a minor player (just look at the array of CRMs that aren't Salesforce), tailored to a very specific market niche, or an "ERP adjacent" platform of some kind. That last bit is the obvious play. The bread & butter of Enterprise Applications IT departments around the world is to build custom stuff that inherits data from ERPs or feeds data into ERPs and similar mission critical business platforms. Speaking as a guy who ran one of these departments in an F250 for about ten years, most of what they build is pretty crappy.