pilap82

Hello Hacker news,

I'm in New York at the end of May (25-29) and would like to visit startups that do B2B SaaS, preferably focused on large companies.

I'm the founder of Per Angusta (per-augusta.com/en) and we help Procurement teams better manage their sourcing pipeline and track their savings.

I'd love to chat and understand how you tackle large B2B sales... Beers are on me.

Thanks, Pierre PS: you can reach me at pierre @ (my domain)

Dear fellow HNers, I need to put together a help site for my B2B SaaS app and I'd rather focus on the content than the implementation.

I've already identified helpIQ but I'd like to see a few alternatives before I make my choice.

main requirements: - hosted or self-hosted - provide table of content, search - no need for chm or whatever specific export format

Thanks!

I'm looking for some feedback from entrepreneurs who launched B2B companies to understand what parts of lean startup methodology are relevant or not. Typically: experimenting might be tricky when your users have to perform a business process which is (supposedly) stable.

any additional tip is welcome.

thanks!

On my spare time, I’m developing a web application which is used by my department. Based on my guts, market knowledge and a few “problem interviews” with peers in other companies, there appears to be a demand for this application outside my company.

I’ve discussed the matter with my boss and he would be interested in pushing this further, i.e. free half of my time to finalise the development and, if all goes well, release me at the end of the year to start my company.

We're somehow in stealth mode (e.g. IT is not necessarily happy with this home grown application, but they fortunately have bigger fishes to fry at the moment), but I'm thinking about asking my company to incubate me and then do a spin-off . At this stage, I’d like to obtain time (my time), acces to some internal expertise (e.g. legal, IT Security, marketing…) and why not some seed funding (but I have other options there).

Some context: I’m a Procurement director at a Global Fortune 500 in Europe (we’re in the services industry). The application I’m developing covers the needs of a distributed Procurement/Sourcing department (currently: 100+ users in 17 countries). As in a lot of services companies, Procurement is not exactly strategic, so it's neither a threat nor an opportunity. On the other hand, entrepreneurship is clearly a value of the company. I have a rather direct access to members of the executive committee (and the support of my boss).

I've identified a few reasons why my company would accept to incubate me (living the values of the company, giving it access to a tool it needs at a very preferred price, and possibly some shares in the spun-off company)… But I'm struggling to see if this is compelling enough, or if there could be more in this incubation for the company.

Do you have any experience with intrapreneurship / spin offs? What other benefits I could advertise to convince them to incubate me? Any pitfall I should be aware of (besides IP — I'm already working on this one)?

Thanks for your help! P.

or is it more adequate for larger audience ventures?

thanks, P.