What I Learned About SaaS at Buildium
outseta.com
outseta.com
One thing I’d add is that it’s really important, critical even, that marketing is operating across the business - supporting customer success, sales and even product and engineering.
Very often marketing sits in a silo as a kind of production house and actually loses track of what is happening in the rest of the business. They end up producing stuff that sales cannot use, they’re not connected to actual customer pain points and they lack detailed knowledge of the product.
For marketing to operate at its best and to be really useful, it needs to act as a support function to other areas of the business, as well as delivering world-class campaign and brand execution. This isn’t ‘knowing HTML and CSS’ but it’s definitely getting involved in other areas of the business.
Nice to see an example of that in real life. Did Buildium eventually target adjacent or new markets?
[1] https://executive.mit.edu/blog/launching-a-successful-start-...
But Buildium is quite a few decades in the making, does this attitude exist among the new startups of today? I doubt that.
Thank you for the article Geoff. Fantastic insight. And one that's very well written, I enjoy how much focus you put into the article around culture, especially one of your finishing paragraphs.
"If you have a high-functioning and aligned team that can respectfully disagree with each other yet still make decisions and execute, you can overcome just about any challenge in business. On the flip side you can have every market advantage in the world, but if your organization isn’t healthy it’s only a matter of time until you reach your demise. I believe this to be true."
I'll make sure I read 'The Advantage' at my earliest opportunity. Thanks again!
Well, that’s a mistake. You don’t have to be good at it but if you have to understand 101. In any executive role in a web SaaS.
Likewise, I would also expect people to have basic knowledge of sales and marketing. If you're in a meeting and people are talking about ROI and CPM and specific strategy, I would expect the other people in the meeting to have a basic understanding of what those terms mean, how they impact the business and peoples' ability to meet their goals, etc. People don't need to be experts, or even journeymen, but ... the opposite, where people think they shouldn't have to have even a basic grasp of the fundamentals of the technology their tech company is built on... that's a bit odd. Where that line is drawn may be up for debate, but some understanding can't hurt.
In a car company, if a marketing person started making wild technologically impossible things about what the car could actually do... alarm bells would be ringing. I don't think there should be that large a divide in any company, really.
Most developers end up having to give an opinion on answers for RFPs, show to customers that they actually understand their business domain, and support the marketing teams with their market research results.
Aren't rent payments typically recurring though?
It’s just a weird wording distinction that made it a weak counter example of subscription revenue. Like if you pointed out that no American consumer has any obligation to shop at Walmart next month. But we know most will.
All these “market experts” and PR people extolling the virtues of the radical idea of paying people for a service remind me of all these dumb cryptocurrency bitcoin shills.
SaaS is a lot different than that. SaaS runs on someone else's computer, with all the plusses and minuses that brings.