Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

Comment by casca | Hacker News Reader

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Great list, thank you.

For people looking to use apps, please consider the likelihood and impact of one of these companies disappearing overnight. Some of them are tech startups without a sustainable critical mass and they could shut down at any time.

If your landing page provider stops providing service, it's probably easy to recover if you have copies of all the email address collected. If your planning and project management tool disappears with all your data, there could be a significant cost.

I'd bet that half the services on this page will not exist in a few years time. If the success of your business relies on them trading, pick carefully.

There's a problem worth fixing... a service that tracks apps and their "probability of existence in x years." Or something.

I'd look for companies that are not funded in that case.

I'd agree that this is one criterion, but being funded is neither necessary nor sufficient :)

If you look at the list above you'll notice that there are plenty of well-funded companies as well as bootstrapped companies. Zendesk has raised $85M. On the other end of the spectrum, you have Tender and Lighthouse from ENTP, which are not funded at all.

Unlike consumer internet startups, I think there's only one criterion for whether or not a SaaS product will be around in 5 years: Does the product work well?

Most of these companies don't/can't rely on network effects to grow, so there's very little winner-takes-all action. That's why you'll see plenty of breathing room for big players and small players alike in any given category.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a bootstrapped, profitable company, so I'm probably biased toward bootstrappers.

Revenue is the important metric. Funding can only delay the inevitable if they do not have revenue. Being funded does not mean you won't have to look for a new vendor in 6 months. Only the runway is a bit longer if the revenue isn't there.

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