Show HN: The SaaS 2.0 Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The SaaS 2.0 Manifesto

1place.app

10 pointsmvila9 comments

Many enterprise apps do integrate with Active Directory for user and group management, and even in app permissions. This is common with SCIM (http://www.simplecloud.info/) a standard API registered with the IETF.

The document organization part sounds laudable - but the products in this area in the past like Sharepoint have not found many fans.

I’m curious about your strategy to onboard both customers and developers. As a dev working on a SaaS, why would I want to build on top of 1Place versus outsourcing enterprise integration via WorkOS? Something like WorkOS seems much less likely to interpose in the relationship between my SaaS and my customers, and much less likely to “Sherlock” me.

Usage based billing in SaaS has a lot of appeal but is also scary to the seller. You don’t want to lose deals because your price is so high for incidental users, but on the other hand you do really want to get payed for all the value your app brings the customer regardless of how many/few minutes they actually need to use the product.

I wish you the best - I think figuring out that usage based billing part could be a big draw.

Thanks, Jake, for your comment.

Here's what we have in mind about onboarding customers and developers.

The potential market is as large as the app market (B2B and B2C), but we will target small businesses at first and progressively expand as follows:

1. Small businesses

2. Mid-size companies

3. Large enterprises

4. Individuals

As with any new app platform, we will face the chicken and egg problem. We will need apps to attract users, and we will need users to attract apps.

We plan to solve this problem by creating the basic apps of any productivity suite (word processor, spreadsheet, to-do list, etc.) to enable us to get a first base of users.

Then, we will put much effort into "developer evangelism", providing quality documentation, tutorials, blog posts, videos, and direct communication to convince app vendors to join the platform.

We are not naive and know how difficult it is to disrupt a market. So, thank you for wishing us good luck! :)

It sounds like step 1 of your plan is suspiciously close to “go head to head with Office and Google Apps on their home turf, and WIN”. That’s a pretty big ticket item. If you’re just going to try to throw some very simple stuff together with open source, what’s gonna pull users to you — just price differentiation? Lots of businesses already pay for Office or Google just to get email.

Keep in mind, building a passionate user base of individuals is extremely helpful marketing lever. It’s a very important part of Notion’s success.

In 2023, when I think of "word processors", I think of them like Notion. When I think of "spreadsheets", I think of them like Airtable. And when I think of "to-do lists", I think of them like Basecamp's to-dos feature.

Also, since the SaaS platform will support document embeddability natively, we may end up with something that could replace Notion, with the advantage that embeddability will be possible with any document.

Regarding the fact that many companies pay for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 to get emails, I believe that may change in the future.

The SaaS platform will provide powerful communication abilities to unify emails, Slack-like apps, and document comments.

Sure, emails will not disappear in one day, so we are considering offering email addresses as a gateway to the platform communication system.

Definitely a huge pain point raised here. All the solutions today are 100% better than anything offered in a bundle prior (Office). But it becomes an absolute cluster trying to manager, let along the issues w onboarding you raised.

Definitely seems like there needs to be some industry wide consensus around this but id imagine that would be difficult with the current VC model. Incentives are in place to "carve out a niche" and then expand horizontally.

B2B is going to hit the "app overload" problem consumers deal with soon. You just cant reasonably track that many software solutions - even if individually they add value

> With the rise of the SaaS model, how we consume apps today is undoubtedly better.

No it's not. Everything has moved to subscription-based pricing at $5, $10, $50/mo for things that used to be one-time purchases. How is the prevalence of one particular delivery model proof said model is "undoubtedly better"?

It's undoubtedly better for the companies seeking to take advantage of people forgetting to turn off their subscriptions and bleeding consumers dry. That's about it.

@pc86 Please read the rest of the article. :)

TLDR:

The SaaS model offers many benefits and is undoubtedly the future of software.

However, when we moved from the good old desktop app to the SaaS apps, we lost a crucial component — the platform or operating system, such as Windows, macOS, or Linux — that was providing the ability to gather, among other things, the members and documents of an organization.

Therefore, we need to build the missing SaaS platform, which will require critical shifts in the following fields:

• Architecture: SaaS apps have to be constructed differently.

• Economic: SaaS vendors must change how they charge their customers.

• Standardization: An open standard is required so users and organizations cannot be locked into a platform.

Sure, it's challenging, but we believe it's the path to sustain the SaaS model.

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