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Ask HN: Integrating early-days startup with giant CRMs – like SAP?

2 points by r4pha ↗ HN
Hello everyone,

I'm a technical cofounder at a 6-ish months old startup. We do route planning and data collection for direct sales -- currently on a niche market.

We've been recently presented what seems like a potentially great opportunity from a big client. After some negotiation, we settled on an initial step that would be integrating our end-user app (for collecting data from the salesmen) to their CRM. This brings us to the present day.

I immediatelly started investigating ways to simply fetch data from their CRM (in this particular case, it was SAP), and right now I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of apparent complexity and how much locked-in and buzzwordy this ecossystem is. It worried me even more after reading Paul Graham's essay [0], on which he says he'd never worry about competing startups working with Oracle (I'd probably put SAP in the same bag).

So, my question is: Does anyone have related experiences or advice to share with us? Here's some added context:

- We're bootstraped;

- We don't pay rent;

- We don't have employees beside the founders;

- We have only two technical people (me +1);

- We have two clients so far;

Thanks a lot in advance.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

4 comments

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alanorourke
I am not totally clear on your question. But instead on integrating directly could you integrate your app with Zappier and use this? https://support.sapanywhere.com/confluence/sapkb/improving-y...
r4pha
It seems like Zapier is some sort of task automation service, which works with SAP Anywhere™ (which _seems_ to be yet another product from SAP). I'll look further into it. Thanks!
dmilicevic
Sounds like that can easily turn into a never-ending business developing and/or business intelligence project for the client you've mentioned. I assume this is not what you want to achieve, otherwise you would be a cofounder at CRM consultancy startup.

- Be as specific as you can about the scope of data you will communicate between and what exactly will be a part of this integration (try not to get involved with anything other than that). - Expect a lot of traffic as CRM's tend to be loaded with useful and useless data which just keeps growing. - you can expect that your client will often want to increase the scope of data fetched or sent to CRM. - you can expect that your client will often want to trash or change data fetched or sent to CRM.

All CRM's have out-of-the-box API which you will probably have to use, so look into that. Usually you can CRUD a record in CRM by providing ID and type values of that record.

Good luck!

r4pha
Thanks for the insight. It's a relatively fragile negotiation, since we're just little guys who received an opportunity to do business with a big corp.

As with the API, we implemented some integration with Salesforce and it was relatively easy. SAP, on the other hand, seems to be a different kind of beast. There's a huge amount of moving parts, which seems a little enterprise-y and complex for a tiny startup to work with.