Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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