Building a SaaS business - 2007 vs 2013. | Hacker News Reader

Building a SaaS business - 2007 vs 2013.

sahilparikh.com

77 pointslogicman21 comments

It is absolutely true that everything about 2013 is superior to 2007 for SaaS businesses, with the debatable exception of the amount of competition in any niche/vertical. It is also true that the best time to start a SaaS business for the 2013 market was 2007 (or as earlier as you can push it). You get a head start on the learning curve, which is formidable, even with lots of people generously sharing what they know about customer acquisition, technical topics, etc etc etc. It is virtually impossible to read your way to scalable customer acquisition (or any other very worthwhile business goal). Past the high-basic/low-intermediate level you have to put things into practice in your own business and see how they work out. In 2007, virtually anybody doing that was breaking new ground for the industry. In 2013, only most people doing that will break new ground for the industry. It's ridiculous how much we don't know yet.

2018 is going to be superior to 2013 in pretty much every way, but don't wait until 2018 to start, if you're on the fence about it.

SaaS pioneers date back to the 1960s so we have decades of knowledge that's floating around. More recently, during the 1990s, we had Application Service Provider that tackled the same issues. Imagine being IBM during those very early years trying to sell the idea of remote computing - it must have been an utterly alien concept to most organizations.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service

I worked at a IBM Mainframe shop in the early 90s. It wasn't so alien because back then there was a semi-infinite smooth graduation from completely internal to completely outsourced and that demarc line seemed in continuous flux with seemingly every customer. Also moving from different levels of inside/outside was pretty smooth and basically user transparent.

We owned our own hardware (some was leased) and more or less supported ourselves but also had an onsite IBM CE more or less full time. We also outsourced our disaster recovery to two different far away places. So it wasn't utterly alien at all, we just kinda smoothly took over or gave away responsibilities. Also decisions were made by tech people with tech people, more or less, rather than businessmen. So there was not much of a knowledge disparity. The businessmen set a budget and a goal, but the techies decided the "right place" to store bits.

Conceptually now you can move from local mail servers to gmail and back as you please, but its not nearly as end-user transparent or as easy and fast as SAAS was back in the day. Maybe someday your email server will be a vmware or whatever image and you'll decide to run it locally on your own hardware or upload it to a private server or a cloud and it'll just transparently "work" but we've got a long way to go before we (in general) reach the level of what mainframes did decades ago.

Another good model for how SAAS worked in the old days was telecom after ma bell broke up and before everything re-merged back into a couple big players. Not unusual for a private line ckt to flow thru 4 or 5 companies all with different demarc points and responsibilities. Things were a little more standardized in the mainframe world 20 years ago than in general now.

Totally off-topic, but welcome back!

Well said!

Never heard of my postmark. You'd think with elasticinbox + someone routing emails for you you'd be done but then who would handle spam? Email is two way, can't wait till I see a Sagas solution to that (probably blind to what's out there.) I mean, there's Pass, DBas, email senders, more analytics than I can count and some great payment processors. Seems the only missing link is a cheap inbound routing/spam fighting system.

I'm interested in managing marketing process so I checked out the current product site. It looks very interesting, I can see marketers finding this useful.

Question: Is the photo of your "team" on the front page of your website a stock photo? It seems like a beautiful office, with a cool looking team. But, when I look at your "about" page - it's a different team!

No biggie - but I was just curious about the thought-process behind it...

Looks like stock photography. I assume it's meant to show a happy project team using their software.

It is a stock photo :) wish we had this kind of an office. Oh well.

What does everyone think is the hardest thing about building a SaaS business at the moment?

I want to make it easier with StartHQ (https://starthq.com) and some of the things I've picked up on are: identifying early adopters, managing private beta invite codes & identifying related apps to integrate with.

When I worked at my first SaaS business in 1998 (we were called Application Service Providers at the time) one of the hurdles we had to overcome was potential customers not understanding how the internet worked. One IT manager had difficulty with the idea that if he could get to AOL, he could get to us.

How times have changed.

How did you find the "need" for Brightpod? It's niche, so I'm wondering how to find gaping holes in software offerings for small businesses. Everyone talks about how SMEs desperately need software, but how do I find out what these needs are if I'm not in the industry myself?

We run marketing campaigns and we spoke to others who had similar problems. Most PM/ Task tools are generic. We are betting on the fact that there are certain functions that are specific to marketing teams and people running these kind of features e.g. workflows to run a campaign, editorial calendar, integration with social networks etc...

Ask them.

It is a understandable that things are a lot different in 2013 vs 2007, and not just for SaaS business models.

Your blog post would have been much more useful (to me) if you had shared data/numbers that you have access to via analytics tools that you are leveraging into your products.

Do marketing teams need a different task management app than another task management app? Why not just use Asana for example or Basecamp?

Task management is like losing weight. Everyone knows the real answer is a little self-discipline, but nobody likes to hear that so they keep buying the latest new app hoping that THIS one will be the silver bullet. The fact that none of them really work any better than a simple to-do list is what makes them addicting. The rush of trying the new thing, followed by the let-down. It's just like drug addiction.

Do they need a different one? Probably not.

Could they benefit from one? Quite possibly. Small amounts of personalization can make people a lot more efficient — even if the actual difference is primarily mental, that still matters as long as your customers have minds.

(Whether that is the case here, I can't say. But I've seen how much a very slightly customized solution can resonate with people.)

(copying my answer from above) - We run marketing campaigns and we spoke to others who had similar problems. Most PM/ Task tools are generic. We are betting on the fact that there are certain functions that are specific to marketing teams and people running these kind of features e.g. workflows to run a campaign, editorial calendar, integration with social networks etc...we'll see how it goes...:)

Today we have a lot of generalist tools for dashboarding, task management... I think the next step is to customize those tools for all domains/sectors (marketing, finance / production, service) in order to deliver the most plug&play/expert products.

No, but they probably think they do, so there's money to be made there.

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