It is too easy to: splash page, Wordpress, "rails new saas" for a product and then try to sell via SEO / outbound, etc that the field is quite saturated - and un-discovered niches are a lot harder than say 2013.
I never got this about SaaS. People talk like it is a vertical. How is saying "I want to start a SaaS" different from saying "I want to start a one time payment ecommerce business?"
I say this btw from having worked at a SaaS business for years.
IMO saas is muddled so it’s meaning is not as much about the billing model anymore.
There are definitely tons of the type of company you’re talking about though.
It’s at a point where most consumers have to decide between one SaaS or another; it muddles retention. A one-time payment business is better these days (or a hybrid) especially if you have a product consumers are willing to come back for.
There's already a cash flow and profit motive in a business, so if a SaaS can demonstrate that it enables more value than it costs, there's a tangible advantage to paying for that service.
Because it is, for many founders. Those who think, "I want to start a startup, make lots of money. A SaaS business is the easiest to start and most investor-friendly." What the business will actually do is irrelevant, something to be picked along the way.
I see it as a vertical too - a column of a larger vertical I call "toilet paper companies" (with no offense meant to actual toilet paper manufacturers and sellers): companies run by people who couldn't care less about what the company is actually producing/offering, and have zero interest in the thing they're selling (beyond pretending to, for marketing reasons). Companies that would gladly switch from making rocket parts to making toilet paper, if they believed it has better long-term ROI.
And yes, people who think "I want to start a one time payment ecommerce business" (aka. "a web store") are a part of that larger vertical too.
Yes a company can be started along a founders personal passion... for this example, lets call it bikes [could be anything]. A founder following passions will create something around bikes - and in most cases fail due to saturated market, competition which they cannot outspend, etc.
Other founders approach business AS the passion. Surveying the competitive landscape, capital models, future growth potential - and marry that with building something for people, helping them solve their problems is the passion, creating a business structure designed around them.
Yes. And my feeling is, this is where our market economy has jumped the shark. People running a business for the sake of running a business are able to put more focus, effort, knowledge and skill into optimizing its success. Many ways of doing so involve reducing the value delivered to the customer, but compensating it with manipulation (e.g. more marketing) or abuse (e.g. lock-in, dark patterns) - and all advantages gained this way compound. Thus, in a fair competition, a business run for the sake of its value has little chance of prevailing against a business run for the sake of being a business.
The problem I see with this is that the value of a business to its customers, and to the society at large, is in the product or service being delivered. The business as an entity is incidental, a necessary evil to generate the value. Businesses being run for the sake of running them seems, to me, like optimizing for precisely the wrong thing - putting the cart before the horse.
I'd like to play a role of an inventor and a builder of crazy technologies. Imagine https://www.noya.co/ or https://frame.work/. My only concern is that not being from a research background or a first world country could hinder my chance of doing that. Hope that made sense.
Time for something completely different.
Not even that, these days people simply start newsletters...
Still, I wouldn't write off the payment model. People seem to prefer subscriptions to one-time payments. If they didn't, Netflix, Spotify, etc., wouldn't enjoy the popularity they do.
I practically know only 2 people willing to pay monthly sub for note taking or various such trivia. 99% of everyone I know is very conservative about monthly subs. Sure Netflix / Spotify / YouTube Premium / etc. are worth it but most apps out there really are not.
Plus there's such a thing as a "sub fatigue" these days. People feel everybody is after a chunk of their wallet each month and are starting to resist. I don't even mean myself or other tech-savvy people; I really mean mothers and grandmothers who have no clue but still don't want to pay up all the time.