Navigating Customer Validation and Scaling Challenges for Early Stage Start-Ups
Early stage start-ups face hurdles in customer validation and scaling. Corporate accelerators offer crucial support, sharing insights and access to enterprise customers.
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What are the greatest challenges working with large enterprise customers
Added on 10/02/2024
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Speaker 1: So, I think the right way to answer this would be to kind of figure out that where in the life cycle the start-up really is. If it's an early stage start-up, what we've seen is that many start-ups look for enterprise customers to get involved with them when they're looking for product market fit. Now, there's a lot of start-ups in this world, and if everybody goes to all the enterprise customers looking for their involvement, the reality is that that's not going to happen. And that's one of the phenomenons that's begun to happen out there, that on the one hand start-ups are told that it's the right thing to get customer validation when you're in the early days of building a product. On the other hand, there's not that many customers that are in a position to dedicate that much time to every single start-up that shows up with that request. So, that's one of the big challenges that early stage start-ups have is that how do they get customer validation in the early days of building their product. And I think what we've typically seen is that people like us who run acceleration programs, corporate accelerators, we can help tremendously in that because we provide start-ups sometimes access to customers, but many a time to the entire machinery that supports those customers. You know, we're a 40-year-old business applications company, we've been selling business application software to some of the largest corporations in the world, and we have a deep understanding of their requirements as well. That's one of the ways in which the early stage start-ups can kind of overcome that hurdle and not get stuck. When the start-up's a little mature and is looking for scaling its business, they've got the product market fit, but now they're looking to acquire customers, that's when a very different aspect of the customer buying behavior starts coming to light. They're looking for characteristics of the start-up over and above the value that the product adds to them. Is the start-up going to be around? Is it well-funded? You know, have they taken care of basic needs of enterprise software? How does this particular product fit in with all the investments I've made over the years? Do they have partnerships with any of my existing vendors? These are the kind of things that get involved in the buying cycle. And that's one of the things that start-ups, again, corporate accelerators do help a lot because they impart that knowledge to the start-ups, especially corporate accelerators that are in the same business. So people that are in the business of selling software can share best practices with start-ups that are building software. Again, I think there's many other avenues available to start-ups to gather that knowledge, but I think this is one of the better avenues that, over the last few years, these accelerators have become more and more mature. It's a great place for start-ups to get that sort of information. I think one of the key things, and I don't think that this gets addressed often enough, is the fact that start-ups come to partners like us looking for access to our customers. And one of the things that they don't seem to recognize early on is the fact that these customers are using our software. We ourselves are innovating and making our software more in line with contemporary needs. We are also looking to partner with start-ups to bring their innovation to our customers. So that aspect of being able to coexist with the customer's existing investments in technology, I think that's one of the key things that start-ups sometimes get wrong. They might solve a customer business pain point, but their definition of the solution doesn't fit with the investments the customer has already made. And getting that right early on can really help a start-up.

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