prise sales focus with products that delight the user, building for the end user in SaaS will drive adoption and thus monetization. Products will now see rapid adoption by virtue of being intuitive and dynamic as opposed to being confusing and complex. Customers no longer require you to capture every use case or business need in your product, and they’re willing to forgo con- siderable flexibility in return for rapid on-boarding, progressive discovery, and context-sensitive help. David Patrick Individual employees and mid-level managers can now take out their corpo- CEO, Apperian rate credit card and expense products, and are becoming direct consumers in the process. The best possible way to land a large enterprise customer is to “Our goal is to provide a platform for call up the CIO and say “we’re excited by how much you like our product and enterprise mobile teams to be we’re happy to note that we now have several hundred users of our product successful. We try to hide all of the within your corporation. We wondered if you were interested in rolling these complexity around issues such as security, role based provisioning, and scalability, into an enterprise license with the administrative dashboard, integration to and just let them provide great mobile your other systems, coordinated billing, provisioning and security?” Many applications to their end users.” cloud companies are doing this with great success. Although this is finally becoming more widely accepted as a best prac- tice, we must still emphasize the importance of building a single instance, multi-tenant product, with a single version of code in production. “Just say no!” to on-premises deployments. Multi-instance, single tenant offer- ings should only apply to legacy software companies moving to a dedi- cated hosting model because they don’t have the luxury of an architectural redesign. Of course it is possible to use virtualization to provide multiple in- stances, but this hybrid strategy will make your engineering team much more expensive and much less nimble. You also want to leverage your core in- Jeff Lawson frastructure as much as possible, even when expanding internationally. This CEO, Twilio generally means investing early in backup and disaster recovery, but if you’re managing your own datacenter, avoid a second production facility as long as “We now enjoy an active community possible (at least past $2M CMRR). of over 100,000 developers behind a pretty straightforward philosophy: Make a Hero out of your Doers. We’ve also started to see unprecedented levels of developer empowerment Empower them to get stuff done by within organizations, meaning that PaaS and IaaS vendors that focus on killer building great products leveraging offerings for the end developer are being discovered and embraced at fantas- our communication platform. Make it tic rates. Let the developers make your decisions, and understand that they easy to use, transparently priced, and above all, no shenanigans!” will be making the decisions for your customers. Build and use clean APIs, and promote your offerings through user conferences, hackathons and devel- oper evangelists to spread the message. Bessemer Venture Partners 6