r4pha

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