Creating an on-premise version of our product for enterprises (as opposed to a pure SaaS version)
Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model.
We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LDAP auth, audit trails etc.) and thus wanted to do a simpler SaaS version with a monthly plan.
But I learned that if you start on the enterprise angle early, you can get some incredibly sticky customers with five, six or even seven figure annual license payments and very predictable cashflows you can raise or borrow against.
This is a great point, and its not necessarily just on prem either. Adding those enterprise features can be a great move to make your product more attractive. We're trying to make the audit trails part a lot easier at Apptrail (https://apptrail.com).
How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? With SaaS you can just do it remotely but if it's on site you need to send someone over I guess
> How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers?
I worked on a similar product. It's just like shipping desktop software, but the people installing the on-premise server are much more savvy than someone who needs their hand held pushing a few buttons.
Given that our customers were global and wanted help quickly, screen sharing was usually the way to go. In addition the server logged any error to a local file the customer sent over when reporting an incident.
One thing I feel is really important is to have an actual person with an email address receive these and reply to them - rather than a ticketing system. This personal connection does wonders in maintaining a good relationship with the customer, especially if things go wrong.
We did both, customer got an iso image with a single line install command. The installer would automatically download all the docker containers and lock the system down.
Since this was the customer’s initial impression (and we wanted the IT gatekeepers to be happy), we strove to get installation as close to turn-key as possible
Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model.
We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LDAP auth, audit trails etc.) and thus wanted to do a simpler SaaS version with a monthly plan.
But I learned that if you start on the enterprise angle early, you can get some incredibly sticky customers with five, six or even seven figure annual license payments and very predictable cashflows you can raise or borrow against.