WorkOS Spring Event 2021 feat. Vercel CEO

after the talk but thanks everyone for joining all right let's jump in so today's agenda what are we going to talk about so i want to start talking first about something i call the enterprise chasm this is really the context for work os and why we're building this feature and and why this product exists and the core crux of this is how you as a developer you as a as a sas vendor can actually move your business up market and go unlock enterprise revenue so i'm going to talk quickly about this

to get started then we're going to switch gears and talk about what is work os actually and as part of that we'll give you an overview of the features we have today how people are using them the functionality that we provide we'll also give some actual examples and demos and talk about pricing and how you can get started with it and then in roughly half an hour we'll switch and have a fireside chat with guillermo rausch who is the founder and ceo of versel which is a very exciting fast-growing new developer tool company

cool all right let's do it let's jump in okay so i want to back up so i want to tell you the story of sas so most sas companies behave this way so imagine you're building a new product you build something like slack a new workplace app and you bring this to market you get a bunch of people to use it and uh users love it adoption spreads through word of mouth viral growth people talk about it on twitter product hunt things like that

eventually some individuals start paying for your app so it keeps growing and then some small teams start paying for it business is doing well and then larger companies start approaching you and saying hey we want to actually buy your app for our entire organization we love it so much we want to run our whole company on this and if this sounds familiar it's because this is the same growth model as products like dropbox asana slack air table zoom

you name it bottom up sas pretty much follows this exact model so imagine you're in the spot and these larger companies have reached out wanting to use your product you'll probably end up talking to the enterprise i.t admin to the person who actually procures software at that company and they'll say hey we need the enterprise version of your app here's our standard requirements here's what we require from vendors and without these features we can't buy your product and usually these are things that come as a bit of a surprise to developers

this blocks deals actually even if end users want to use your product even if they're emphatically wanting to bring it into the company they can't because the enterprise it admin doesn't have these features they need so what's what's actually happening here like like zooming out a little bit what's what's occurring here this is what i call the enterprise chasm so going up market as you try to go sell to larger and larger companies what has changed is that previously your end user was the buyer so your actual person using the app but that's not the case anymore you have a different persona a different

buyer and this is the enterprise i.t and the kind of the cio they've become the gatekeepers for your company's growth and actually getting customers and these groups these people have a totally different set of feature needs that's what they're asking for when they say we need the enterprise version of their app it's not the core end user functionality it's these other features and realistically they don't care about your special product features they don't care about what makes you know airtable better than excel they care about actually these other things that's related to their specific job as an it admin which is rolling out

software and security across the company and the gap between the features that you build when you're just building the product initially for end users driving that product like growth and actually later on when you try to go monetize it with enterprise customers that's the enterprise chasm between these two things so what are features enterprise customers require what are these people actually asking for well typically it's things around security automation control so you want to be able to control the configuration of things visibility into how the app is behaving trust in that you're going to do what