[HN Gopher] I started SaaS companies in 2013 and 2021 - how thin...
___________________________________________________________________
I started SaaS companies in 2013 and 2021 - how things have changed
Author : zuhayeer
Score : 645 points
Date : 2021-09-21 01:15 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.airplane.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.airplane.dev)
| rubiquity wrote:
| SaaS is all grown up now!
| neil_s wrote:
| This is super insightful, thanks for writing it up! Any details
| on the smart GTM strategy between enterprises and SMBs? I feel
| like enterprise is a dangerous place to start because of the long
| test/iterate loop, but SMBs could make your initial acquisition
| cost numbers look terrible.
| forgingahead wrote:
| _Seed rounds are bigger: At Heap, we raised $2M on a $12M cap
| after having a working product and some early traction. Today, it
| 's not uncommon to see a pre-product company raise $5M on $25M or
| even higher_
|
| I'm seeing this as well and it's eye-watering how inflated the
| valuations have become for pre-product companies with no clear
| distribution levers.
|
| The consequence of this easy money has been a lot of flash-in-
| the-pan startups that seem more stable than in eras past (they've
| got lots of employees, a nice office, and some good press
| coverage, they must be legit!), but actually can flame out pretty
| quickly after a couple of years of serving actual customers.
|
| As a result, there are more buyers who are just more wary of new
| SaaS companies to begin with - they have the legitimate concern
| of whether you'll be around in a few years to continue supporting
| their needs, or just disappear with a nice "It was a great
| journey" blog post.
|
| While capital has become commoditised, the market is still
| yearning for more good tools, and SaaS is still a good delivery
| method with acceptable pricing. Founders should certainly think
| very carefully about why they are raising before they do so, and
| maybe even skip it altogether.
| mongodude wrote:
| Hope my founding team read this post! The bar to run a company is
| so high these days that you can't settle for anything mediocre!
| Also, if you have a product market fit in 2021, consider yourself
| lucky and focus on scaling it. It is getting very difficult to
| find a niche where you can scale as you would in 2013.
| pictur wrote:
| can a saas product be extracted from every subject? this brings
| to mind gold seekers and those who sell them pickaxes and shovels
| amir-h wrote:
| Do you feel like VCs in general are now more open to funding
| close to 1 year of runway just to get an MVP out and test product
| market fit? or is it your background as a 2nd time founder that
| drives VCs to trust you with less PMF proof?
| raviparikh wrote:
| People are now raising "pre-seed" rounds in the $250k to $1m
| range that are intended to do exactly what you describe.
| Generally from a group of angel investors though rather than an
| institutional VC.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| > In 2021, there's a dozen really cool SaaS launches on HN or
| Product Hunt every day. A compelling value prop and demo video is
| no longer a guarantee that people will just check out your
| product.
|
| Speaking from the buyer-side of SaaS, I expect this is because
| users are starting to realize that they don't want three dozen
| browser tabs open at all times to accomplish basic business
| functions. IT departments are realizing that siloing business
| operations in that many different apps means you need a massive
| DE team to keep everything integrated and in sync, hoping that
| these SaaS companies stay in business and keep robust APIs. No
| wonder data engineer is quickly becoming the hottest new role.
| dools wrote:
| $5m pre product raises!?
|
| Where is that shit happening. I have a product with customers and
| can't get 6 figures.
| zo1 wrote:
| The cynical person in me would say that may be because you
| haven't had the right "introductions" yet.
| belter wrote:
| Also there you have milking for introductions :-)
| danjac wrote:
| tbf nor can Uber.
| belter wrote:
| Its happening in the land of milking people who got lucky, have
| a lot of money, and think it was by their own merit. Or people
| who have money from somebody else who is burning in their
| pocket and so on. You think any of these billion dollar
| companies is profitable?
| doppp wrote:
| Hmm, sounds like PLG is the hot new buzzword to describe the
| search for PMF while burning VC cash (wow I realized I used 3
| acronyms in this sentence). This article is clearly for people
| building SaaS with venture capital.
|
| What about founders who don't go the VC route and choose to
| bootstrap instead? PLG seems to be out of the question unless one
| has a long runway. I reckon even for the bootstrappers, things
| have changed between 2013 and 2021.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| For the tech-guys on HN like me:
|
| PLG = Product-Led-Growth
|
| PMF = Product-Market-Fit
|
| (VC = Venture Capital, but that should be already common
| knowledge)
|
| While I found it quite entertaining to imagine that the _P_
| olynesian _L_ eaders _G_ roup is searching for the _P_ acific
| _M_ usic _F_ estival while burning _V_ enture _C_ apital cash,
| I had to dig a bit for the acronym's explanation to come up.
| [deleted]
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Going by articles like this -
| https://www.productled.org/foundations/what-is-product-led-g...
| - PLG indicates that purchase and adoption patterns in B2B SaaS
| have changed in a way such that salespeople are less important
| than they used to be.
|
| I'm not convinced. In B2B the user of a product in a company is
| rarely the purchaser of the same product. Has that relationship
| pattern changed significantly? That article at least doesn't
| talk about that.
| ayewo wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| The definition of PLG offered by the article suffers from
| magical thinking by anthropomorphizing products (unless we
| are now capable of making products that are sentient):
|
| "Product-led growth (PLG) is a business methodology in which
| user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention _are
| all driven primarily by the product itself_."
| debarshri wrote:
| Seed rounds are larger because baseline of seed has changed.
| Investors expect you to derisk lot of things when you try to
| raise capital during seed as compared to what it used to be back
| in the day simply because today barrier to create SaaS product is
| low. You do not need ton money to create something to validate
| whether your product works or not.
|
| Yes there are many SaaS products than before but there are many
| successful SaaS products than before too. You really have to
| standout and innovate now more than ever. That means, when you
| launch in Hacker News or Product Hunt, your product cannot be
| premature. My opinion is that if you are a serious company you
| should delay launching on HN or PH as much as you can. Once you
| are out, the destiny of the product is not your control. Imagine
| if the campaign fails, you are going to have hard time explaining
| to investors why the campaign failed. Instead, I think one can
| control all the odds around the product, de-risk by making sure
| there is a pre-existing group of dedicated users already and then
| launch.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I strongly disagree. HN/PH launches are short lived media
| events with (usually) little lasting impact. If you blame a
| failed HN launch campaign for a failing company then I don't
| believe your company was ever going to make it in the first
| place.
|
| Your product should be easy to find as early as possible. You
| need the customer feedback to build the right thing and you
| need the compounding effects of an early internet presence (eg
| SEO). Don't hold back launching, launch while you're still at
| least somewhat embarrassed of your product.
| hinkley wrote:
| > Product MVPs have a much higher degree of polish and companies
| wait much longer to launch
|
| Translation: people are distancing themselves from the MVP
| concept.
| another-dave wrote:
| Or that MVP isn't just about your product in isolation but also
| about the marketplace you're going into.
|
| If there's no-one selling drinks in the park on a hot day, a
| homemade lemonade stand might do good business. If there's a
| cafe and a food market in the park & 5 ice-cream shops nearby
| it would be harder to get the same outcome for the original
| product
| hughhopkins wrote:
| I think Ravi (the author) is spot. The difficulty is the table
| stakes features for SaaS products have increased so much as the
| industry has grown and so have expectations.
|
| That being said I think people have erred way too much away
| from the MVP concept and aren't fundamentally testing the
| biggest unknown with their MVPs. Of course you're going to need
| SSO at some point but you don't need it for a MVP.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Yeah, still feel like MVP is a great way to start. If people
| want your product without it being polished, then you know you
| really solved a problem. And not just any problem, but an
| overlooked one (because nothing solving this is polished yet).
| libertine wrote:
| Couldn't it just be that resources are more abundant and know-
| how is more spread?
|
| You have way more designers, software devs, libraries, etc, now
| in comparison to 2013. The trend will be for these things to be
| almost "commodities"... even for solo founders, you don't need
| to know design to copy/inspire yourself from a plethora of
| examples out there.
|
| With no code tools you can quickly slap things together to
| validate stuff, before outsourcing the development to somewhere
| else if you need to get things going, or hire a dev.
|
| Things are just easier and more abundant, so to make the
| classical "MVP" or a more polished "MVP" probably doesn't
| require that much extra effort/resources.
|
| Also you need to realize that standards have changed, some
| small things that were valuable are now taken for granted.
| rozenmd wrote:
| In my experience from building the 191st uptime monitor (+ site
| speed & puppeteer checks), MVPs don't work for established
| product ideas.
|
| Customers expect polish, and they expect a lot more
| functionality than the bare minimum.
|
| For context, I kept a twitter thread detailing what I worked
| on, and when the customers started coming:
| https://twitter.com/RozenMD/status/1364881512500404224?s=20
| Bjartr wrote:
| > Customers expect polish, and they expect a lot more
| functionality than the bare minimum.
|
| That's why it's the minimum viable product, and not the bare
| minimum product. Determining what's needed for viability is
| an important part of the MVP design process.
| mLuby wrote:
| You're right, but there's a point at which "minimum" is no
| longer appropriate.
|
| I'd expect an "MVP" for an electric car company like Tesla
| Motors to be a microcar, but instead it was a luxury sports
| car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcar
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster
| adelpozo wrote:
| Interesting, why do you think would that be? Difficult to reuse
| code/infra from the mvp for the final product? Or is it that
| the mvp is hard to define and ends up being the product? None
| of the above? Interested to hear the thoughts behind the
| comment
| withinboredom wrote:
| MVPs used to look like the rest of the web. Now people expect
| a "design" in a product. The web looks much different than it
| did even 10 years ago, but browser defaults haven't changed
| much in 30 years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't think people expect it so much as that the designs
| that put form over function are pushed so hard that it
| _seems_ as though people expect it because there aren 't
| any function-over-form alternatives. Fair chance that if
| you bucked that trend that you'd end up with happy users
| and a higher retention for the longer term even if in the
| shorter term your conversion rates may be a bit lower.
|
| Similar to how the quality tools rarely look as snazzy as
| the wanna-be's, and are sold to a more professional
| audience at a higher price but lower volume. They also
| typically need much less advertising and marketing, they
| are sold by reputation and word of mouth.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Maybe, but I will admit that I trust a SaaS product more
| that has a better design with slick front end components.
| When I see a rudimentary but functional product, I shy
| away
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Would you still shy away if the product was uniquely
| solving an important problem for you? I am in the same
| boat as you but I think as though I would only shy away
| if the product was marginally useful to me and I probably
| would have stopped using them eventually anyways
| handrous wrote:
| It's peacock feathers. You demonstrate company/product
| health by burning cash keeping your design "modern", even
| if a simpler but less-expensive-looking design would have
| been better for UX.
| hughhopkins wrote:
| This is a good point and ties into the whole funding
| trap. I imagine some founders find it difficult to show a
| shitty looking MVP when you have investors looking
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| This is true, but as a signal it still does work. If the
| front end is flashy, they definitely put some money and
| resources into it, which means they have those to begin
| with
| switch007 wrote:
| I think people have got more superficial. Especially if
| there is any kind of social aspect to an app/product -
| because of peer judgement
|
| Look at the kind of cakes people under 40 have. It's
| those Instagram ones which are 50cm tall and have bars of
| chocolate sticking out. The cake taste does not matter,
| only how it looks on Instagram.
|
| Edit: I ack that people have always cared how things look
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| > Look at the kind of cakes people under 40 have. It's
| those Instagram ones which are 50cm tall and have bars of
| chocolate sticking out.
|
| Simply not true, this is a caricature that you're seeing
| because only the vapid or exceptional stuff goes to
| Instagram.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's apparently true if you s/cake/wedding cake/ (and
| s/Instagram/wedding photos/), though. I remember the
| shock I felt when I first learned that in the US, the
| cake-cutting ceremony features a _fake, plastic cake_ (in
| order to support shapes and sizes otherwise prohibitively
| hard to make with food), and guests get served a
| different cake, shaped for mass baking and cut in the
| back.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'm not saying the fake plastic cake doesn't happen in
| the US; I'm sure it does. But it's nowhere near as common
| as you seem to believe it is. I've never been to a
| wedding with a cake like that.
| blfr wrote:
| Is OP lurking? I know this is not TRL but I'd love to read a post
| for this exact timeframe for changes in technology: frontend,
| backend, infra.
| raviparikh wrote:
| (I'm the author!) That's a great idea, I might try to write
| something like that!
| bjarneh wrote:
| > 3) Product MVPs have a much higher degree of polish and
| companies wait much longer to launch
|
| The Airbnb story where they launched with no payment solution to
| get a feel for the market/product always fascinated me. Maybe
| those days are over, where you can hack something together
| quickly, just to try it out?
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Fundamentally, I still believe that if you can find the right
| problem to solve, even if it is a hack, people will use it no
| matter what. But seeing as more people have spent resources on
| looking for those opportunities, I would assume the fruit is
| much higher on the tree now, so to speak.
| matsemann wrote:
| Ironically, the increase of SaaS businesses have made me more
| vary of actually using them.
|
| It seems like so many wants to have a successful semi-solo SaaS
| that pay their bills. They aren't longer a way to sell a product
| and a startup idea, but an attempt at a lifestyle. Some people
| throw up smooth landing pages for barely working products, and
| quickly move on to the next idea if it doesn't stick.
|
| How can I invest time and money in using a product if I'm afraid
| the founder will bail after a few months?
| erikbye wrote:
| > How can I invest time and money in using a product if I'm
| afraid the founder will bail after a few months?
|
| Would you rather a risk a much bigger one-off payment? For
| software? Sure, it works now, but it might never get updated,
| and eventually stop working altogether due to OS updates or
| other factors.
|
| The one-time payment model is a much greater risk to the
| consumer than monthly subscriptions.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Would you rather a risk a much bigger one-off payment?
|
| That's a false choice. The problem with the proliferation of
| "services" is that many are hard to cancel, or are betting
| that I'll forget to cancel.
| Otek wrote:
| > The one-time payment model is a much greater risk to the
| consumer than monthly subscriptions.
|
| Short term - yes. But long term? It seems there is no point
| in planning to use a software for years now. And I don't like
| to migrate my knowledge base to new tool, every 2 years. But
| is there a way other than mastering org-mode on weekends?
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| > But is there a way other than mastering org-mode on
| weekends?
|
| 1. a quick tutorial will be plenty to get you started:
| https://mickael.kerjean.me/2017/03/20/emacs-tutorial-
| series-...
|
| 2. if you don't want to bother learning emacs, no worries,
| use one of the web apps such as the one I built: https://de
| mo.filestash.app/login?next=/view/org/emacs.org#ty...
| chrisweekly wrote:
| See also ObsidianMD and Athens Research.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Long-term? Not much beyond org-mode + org-roam at the
| moment. I've seen one or two alternatives (open-source
| products), but I don't remember their names.
|
| The rule still applies: whatever you chose, do _not_ become
| dependent on a SaaS offering. The problem is in the name:
| _service_. A service is something other people do for you.
| They can stop at any time.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| We are dependent on food and water, which requires
| ongoing support from a vendor.
|
| The problem is in having a trustworthy vendor or a
| healthy marketplace of alternatives you can switch to.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's true. We're all dependent on plenty of services.
| But the difference between those and SaaS is that they're
| all _commodity services_. This means you have a steady
| selection of service providers, all providing equivalent
| service, and there 's no risk with any individual
| provider disappearing - you can just switch over to a
| different one, and get the same thing.
|
| An important aspect of most SaaS businesses is that
| they're _not_ commodities. It 's a core part of most SaaS
| business models - they're purposefully sticky. When you
| become dependent on one, and it shuts down, or gets
| acquired, or decides to discontinue the features you care
| about, there usually is no drop-in replacement. There may
| not be a replacement at all, for the combination of
| features you need. And whatever alternative you find,
| migrating all your data is usually difficult, and often
| not possible.
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| I don't agree with this at all. If a software product doesn't
| get upgraded you have 1) time to look for an alternative
| according to your own priorities 2) ways of mitigating
| potential risks (if it's a security problem, like airgapping
| the solution) 3) the ability to make value-based calls on the
| risks of not having updates
|
| With SaaS you have all of these same constraints (as there's
| no guarantee they update the service either), plus the risk
| that they just turn it off one day on a timeline you can't
| control, plus potential risks that they will leak your data
| if they don't maintain security (or want additional money),
| and with the added risk/cost that they may decide to no
| longer support something you need due to a forced "upgrade"
| (like API compatibility).
| erikbye wrote:
| These are also valid points.
|
| Anecdote: A company I know used to have an on-premise
| product. The customer paid for a yearly license*. Then they
| developed a cloud based offering, a SaaS. In order to force
| customers over to this solution they simply stopped
| updating and giving support to their old product.
|
| * Sometimes we forget that the old software model of
| offline or customer-installed (client, or server, on
| premise) also has fees attached to it, in the form of a
| license you have to keep maintaining. Often yearly.
|
| If the customer wanted to keep using the product, they
| could not stop paying the license fee just because the
| vendor stopped updating and supporting it.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > Sometimes we forget that the old software model of
| offline or customer-installed (client, or server, on
| premise) also has fees attached to it, in the form of a
| license you have to keep maintaining. Often yearly.
|
| A lot of the enterprise on-premises software that I use
| (from Atlassian, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) come with
| perpetual licences. The annual maintenance cost is for
| support and for updates. I can think of a few exceptions
| that only have term licences, like IBM PurifyPlus, but
| based on my personal experience, a majority of on-
| premises software falls under the former category.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Yes but basically all of that software is so mission
| critical that you simply cannot _not_ pay for support and
| upgrades. Ergo you have an annual license fee to be able
| to actually operate it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _For software? Sure, it works now, but it might never get
| updated_
|
| That's often good rather than bad, as many products are
| optimized _away_ from usability over time.
|
| > _and eventually stop working altogether due to OS updates
| or other factors._
|
| There are means to mitigate that (e.g. running software in
| VMs), that work fine as long as software isn't fighting it.
|
| Arguably the biggest factor causing software rot, making one-
| time payment risky, is purposefully adding dependencies on
| vendor's servers (e.g. for "collaboration") where they don't
| belong[0]. This is also what is used to justify the
| continuous stream of updates - whereas in reality, it's just
| there to create a plausible reason for why a perfectly good
| product now requires a subscription. Software that's designed
| to be paid one-off from the start doesn't require these kinds
| of anti-features, and doesn't rot nearly as fast.
|
| --
|
| [0] - It's famously said that Dropbox was doomed from the
| start, because it's a feature, not a product. Unfortunately,
| that view is part of what's making SaaS so incredibly user-
| hostile. Syncing data is a feature completely orthogonal to
| applications, and even operating systems. There's no need for
| a SaaS vendor to make their own synced storage for app data,
| unless they're purposefully trying to entrap their users.
| erikbye wrote:
| > That's often good rather than bad, as many products are
| optimized away from usability over time.
|
| I feel Adobe products are a great example of this.
| waylandsmithers wrote:
| This is definitely one of the downsides- but also possible that
| Google for example gets bored of one of its products and shuts
| it down, or acquires a product just to shut it down.
|
| Personally I think one of the upsides is that the semi-solo
| team might actually decide that the successful product is
| "done" and move on or go into maintenance mode. IMO products
| like Spotify and Slack could have reached that point a while
| ago- sure they could still work on uptime, data compression,
| etc. But there is only so much you can tack onto a music player
| or a chatroom. They keep shipping more redesigns and new
| features that don't make users any better off but need to keep
| people busy.
| htrp wrote:
| I mean at sometime, you may as well just shift the
| engineering team onto another/newer product. Spotify could
| have totally made something like clubhouse.....
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It made me more wary of SaaS businesses with teams and venture
| capital behind.
|
| In my experience companies with VC money are much more likely
| to "flip" a business and sell to someone else causing
| disruption, or bad updates who make the product worse.
|
| I still haven't had any of the subscriptions for products made
| by indie developers get significantly worse or change
| significantly.
|
| They keep the lights on, add some features without breaking
| existing stuff.
|
| If they're in for the lifestyle more than the money, I think
| they're less likely to sell and more likely to hold and
| maintain (assuming they're charging enough to make a living).
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Yep, sustainable dependencies are a key criteria for us. I'm
| happy to see OSS with a big community or paid hosting. OTOH,
| grown wary to see VC-backed (esp. big rounds) or corporate
| side-projects (esp. at unicorns with high churn in teams +
| tech, or bigco's with no OSS community governance track
| records).
|
| Yes, it's doable to replace things after a year or two. But,
| if a bunch of dependencies have risk, that turns into a rip-
| and-replace treadmill of negative customer value and burns
| out a team.
| libertine wrote:
| >How can I invest time and money in using a product if I'm
| afraid the founder will bail after a few months?
|
| I'm sorry to say this, but this just shows lack of empathy.
|
| You're looking at your belly-button, because you're a
| particular type of user that's aware of product/company life-
| cycles/spams... very few people are thinking about the problem
| of a founder bailing out after a few months when they're
| subscribing to something.
|
| Plus if you're so afraid of that when you're looking to use the
| product, then it must be a really good product and most likely
| the founder knows he is onto something. In that scenario the
| most probable outcome would be the founder selling to someone
| else, or stop updating, then people just naturally migrate to
| something else.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| Nobody ever mentions profits. That hasn't changed
| raviparikh wrote:
| Plenty of people mention profits! Companies are rewarded for
| efficiency and profitability (more so than they were 10 years
| ago). E.g. see the massive valuations relative to ARR and
| growth that Zapier, Mailchimp, and Calendly all achieved over
| the last year.
|
| That said, if you can spend $1 to get $1 of ARR, or even $2 to
| get $1 of ARR, and your company is doing 100% net revenue
| retention or better, then you likely will make more money over
| the long term selling equity, going unprofitable to spend on
| growth, and getting paid back over then next 12-24 months due
| to the nature of compounding growth / exponentials.
| rushabh wrote:
| The big question is, _if_ customers are going to stay over a
| long run. Also the assumption is that SAAS companies are to
| keep growing, while I see them all converging on the same
| market / same dollar spend (CRM, Support, Workflow). There
| will be consolidation at some point, and it won't be pretty.
| raviparikh wrote:
| > The big question is, if customers are going to stay over
| a long run.
|
| Plenty of public companies have had several years in a row
| of >100% net retention. When Dropbox filed its S-1 it had a
| graph showing that every quarterly cohort of customers who
| had signed up had continued to grow massively in value over
| time, and i imagine the majority of successful SaaS co's
| could show a similar chart.
| TradingPlaces wrote:
| The article mentioned profits not once. Everything you just
| said is the bullshit companies say to get investors to
| pretend profits don't matter.
| raviparikh wrote:
| Yes, I could have mentioned profits in the article, but I
| wouldn't say that profitability (or lack thereof) is one of
| the primary things that has changed between 2013 and 2021,
| and the article is about changes.
|
| To elaborate on my earlier comment: Salesforce has been
| unprofitable during almost its entire 20+ year existence
| and it's worth over $200B. It uses debt and equity to
| finance growth much more quickly than using profits to do
| so and thus has grown extremely fast. Do you believe
| Salesforce is in imminent danger of failure?
| asdff wrote:
| >Companies are rewarded for efficiency and profitability
|
| Uber would have been wiped out by now if it came out 20 years
| ago. Burning cash on the promise of future profit that still
| hasn't come around is a recent concept. Even companies like
| Standard Oil and Walmart would make money from other streams
| when they are putting a price squeeze on some competitor. It
| blows my mind how much slack these companies are getting,
| probably just because companies operating this way are a dime
| a dozen these days so there is some safety in numbers if TINA
| of places to invest in tech.
| icedchai wrote:
| Seems unlikely, seeing 20 years ago we had just come out of
| the the dot-com boom. I'd say this has been the norm since
| the 90's.
| asdff wrote:
| If it had been the norm since the 90s I would be ordering
| cat food from pets.com today rather than chewy.com. That
| site had like one unprofitable year and that was enough
| to close doors in 2000, even though this was clearly a
| brilliant idea. The concept of buying runway didn't exist
| then.
| icedchai wrote:
| It worked for some and not others. Amazon and eBay were
| losing money for years.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Even companies like Standard Oil and Walmart would make
| money from other streams when they are putting a price
| squeeze on some competitor.
|
| If you have evidence Standard Oil ever sold anything at a
| loss please share. I don't know about Walmart but
| everything I've read suggests that Standard Oil won by
| getting better at manufacturing faster than its competitors
| and passing on those cost savings to consumers. Less
| efficient companies failed, as those selling worse products
| for high prices are wont to do.
| rtpg wrote:
| I mean it's _the_ Standard Oil. They used their massive
| market domination and control of every step of the
| process to just destroy competitors.
|
| I mean yeah they succeeded because it turns out that for
| a commodity just having one large network for everything
| is more efficient (and if you own everything, no
| middlemen!). But that's just an argument for
| nationalising commodities.
|
| All that Standard Oil profit year after year came from
| somebody.
| vasco wrote:
| > But that's just an argument for nationalising
| commodities.
|
| Because the government is so great at efficiently doing
| things and selling things I can totally see how you'd
| make the leap to nationalize all commodities.
| asdff wrote:
| Standard oil raising prices on customers in a monopoly
| and cutting prices to the point of not making a profit in
| markets with competitors was one of the central arguments
| of the U.S. government prosecution in the antitrust case.
| In the case of walmart it has been engaged in a price war
| with Aldi in certain markets in the past decade.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Profits!? That's a dirty word for startups: means you aren't
| spending enough on R&D or growth </sarcasm>
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The company is the product. The exit is the profit.
| raviparikh wrote:
| There are lots of public SaaS companies where the founders
| and even investors have continued to hold the vast majority
| of their shares long after the IPO. LPs have much higher
| tolerance these days for longer periods of illiquidity for
| the VCs they've invested into. People are going "long" more
| than ever.
| LurkingPenguin wrote:
| > Seed rounds are bigger: At Heap, we raised $2M on a $12M cap
| after having a working product and some early traction. Today,
| it's not uncommon to see a pre-product company raise $5M on $25M
| or even higher. However I think there's still a ways to go-SaaS
| outcomes have grown in size more than 10x in the last 8 years,
| but seed valuations haven't climbed 10x.
|
| Why would the valuations climb 10x? This makes sense given the
| author's second observation:
|
| > There are way, way more SaaS companies and getting initial
| traction is harder
|
| The rounds are bigger because more money is needed to compete.
| But investors would lose their shirts if they multiplied the
| valuations by 10-fold.
| raviparikh wrote:
| (I'm the author of the post - thanks to whoever posted this to
| HN!)
|
| This is a good point, if probability of success decreased 5x
| while average outcome increased 10x, then a 2x increase in seed
| valuations would be reasonable. I don't actually know the
| differences in probability of success / expected value for the
| typical seed stage startup, but anecdotally it doesn't feel
| less likely. It is definitely harder to get off the ground, but
| I see a lot fewer companies (anecdotally) stumbling in the
| "middle" part of the journey between $2M to $100M in ARR or so,
| whereas I feel like in the past a lot more hot SaaS companies
| used to stall out. So I think that washes out against the
| harder initial stages.
| donnythecroc wrote:
| You are no.1 on HN. Would be interested to see if this drives
| more customers for you than launch post!?
| raviparikh wrote:
| I hope so! We did a "Show HN" but it didn't really catch
| on-oh well. So far this has driven a small bump in signups
| in the last hour though.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The world is bigger; more people are part of the economy; the
| average person is wealthier; the average person is more
| productive; the average person or company spends more of their
| income on services than in 2013.
|
| In a winner-take-most market, it's easier for the acquirer to
| leverage a successful SaaS company 10x what they could in 2013.
| This doesn't surprise me.
| [deleted]
| NmAmDa wrote:
| Average person in united states maybe
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would bet the opposite. Average person in US gets less
| wealthy, average person globally gets more wealthy. Tenth
| decile in US gets more wealthy, 9th tread water, and the
| other 8 deciles revert to global mean.
| kbumsik wrote:
| Off topic, but what is the theme in the main screenshot? I often
| saw that kinds of design (much rounded, much gradient shadow) in
| new SaaS.
| nrabulinski wrote:
| It's called neumorphism and it got super popular around 2020
| but, from my personal observations, it went away as fast as it
| came. Don't get me wrong, there're still a lot of designs that
| follow this language but I haven't seen it utilized much
| outside of mockups.
| kbumsik wrote:
| Thanks for the insight. I personally thought it is kinda
| Skeuomorphism + Flat and I was right!
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| How exactly do you reach large companies? Is it different than in
| 2013?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| It seems from article that the big change is how VCs now accept
| product-led growth today versus the past.
| xupybd wrote:
| Wow that Airplane app looks amazing. It's a little on the
| expensive side for the size of company I'm in but would be a no
| brainer for a bigger company.
| raviparikh wrote:
| Thank you! If you send me a note at ravi@airplane.dev I'm happy
| to discuss a discount or I can bump up the free limit for you.
| We definitely don't want price to be a blocker to try it out.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Seconding the parent's post on it looking amazing. I'm going
| to try it out now for our B2C app, we were looking to build
| some internal apps and you might be saving us a lot of time
| there.
| thom wrote:
| Currently getting this on iOS:
|
| Application error: a client-side exception has occurred
| (developer guidance).
| erikbye wrote:
| So more or less abandoned already?
| raviparikh wrote:
| Airplane.dev is not abandoned - I just messaged the above
| user to look into the issue. Funding-wise, we have 3+
| years of runway so we're certainly not going anywhere any
| time soon.
| raviparikh wrote:
| Where are you getting this error and what's your account?
| Send me a note at ravi@airplane.dev and I can look into it.
| [deleted]
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| My impression is that every SaaS that is successful on
| ProductHunt (PH) or HN gets copied dozens of times within a few
| months. That's especially true for technically simple products. A
| good example is maybe privacy-friendly web analytics: I think
| products like Fathom and Simple Analytics were the first to
| really go after this angle (undoubedtly there were others before
| them though), and in less than 6 months dozens (hundreds?) of
| copycats turned up with exactly the same USP and the exact same
| look & feel. And interestingly it isn't the first mover who seems
| to win that market but rather the company with the most agressive
| (and sometimes outright misleading) marketing. So being the first
| doesn't guarantee your success anymore, at least if you don't
| have enough time to grow undisturbed.
|
| Personally I'd avoid posting products on PH or HN for that reason
| and instead focus on growing organically in a niche market where
| you're not immediately discoverable by copycat founders. In
| general PH feels more and more phony to me and I think there's a
| lot of astroturfing going on.
| lovetocode wrote:
| Agreed. I built an app that was in the Top 5 to Top 10 paid
| business apps on the Apple App Store for about a year. It
| causes so much drama with copy cat developers from the the
| south east pacific. I had people steal my name on the App Store
| and other victims of these copy cats start to turn on each
| other because they all think they are stealing ideas from one
| another. It is absolutely bonkers.
| lupire wrote:
| Why would the victims accuse the other victims, who are
| creating different products?
| tchock23 wrote:
| For a laugh, go and search for product feedback board
| (upvote/downvote feature requests) tools on Product Hunt.
|
| I swear there is an exact, cheaper replica of tools like Canny
| every day (which itself was a clone of UserVoice before they
| went enterprise).
|
| Staking your big launch of something truly novel on Product
| Hunt is just asking for clones with 2-3 months.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Funny, because I've started a privacy-friendly analytics tool
| [0]. It really happened by "accident", as I initially tried to
| solve my own problem (analytics for my website without an ugly
| cookie-banner) and only later discovered there were many
| existing solutions.
|
| Now that I went all-in on it, I think there is much more to it
| than what you can see at a first glance. There are a lot of
| dividing factors, like support, features, ... or in our case a
| unique design and good support for resellers (agencies) and
| technical people (server-side integration). We have been called
| copy-cats, but that doesn't mean different people won't find
| similar solutions for the same issue like it happens with us or
| in science from time to time.
|
| [0] https://pirsch.io/
| dspillett wrote:
| That could work in my favour though. I've got a couple of
| things I've wanted for a while, that existing projects don't
| _quite_ work like but I have no time to make myself. Maybe if I
| publish an MVD (minimum viable demo!) making it look like an
| attempt at an MVP, people will copy the idea and do it well
| enough I 'll be able to use it...
|
| The main argument against that working is that I'd prefer OSS
| self-hosted options -- no one chasing the quick buck is going
| to go that way!
| marban wrote:
| Is PH really still relevant these days? Based on the comments
| it feels more like a circle jerk of a dozen die-hard users and
| the rest being semi-automated spam mostly from India. No tough
| questions, just self-congratulating Emojis.
| artembugara wrote:
| I think it was Justin Kan who tweeted something like:
|
| "if someone else could copy your product, and they have more
| customers/grow better, then you aren't the right fit for it"
|
| Also, nowadays, product is a small part of your company. Can
| you remember the last time you saw someone having an initial
| traction just because they have a great product?
|
| You can copy Airtable/Notion as long as you want, adding some
| more features to it. But it's not how it works, I believe.
| debarshri wrote:
| One of the trends I have been seeing, especially in devtool
| space is there products built by agencies and there are
| products built by companies where it is their flagship
| product. When you have a situation like this, then it dilutes
| the value proposition of your product. Even though, agency
| driven product might be serious or might not be seriously
| pursued, it definitely make the space red ocean.
|
| I wonder how people generally combat this kind of scenarios.
| zerkten wrote:
| One of the weaknesses of agency-driven products is the lack
| of market understanding and ongoing connection. It's
| frequently a sweep up of anecdotes from their developers,
| clients, and perhaps some other research. Sometimes it's a
| vanity project for someone who ultimately knows that they
| won't turn the agency into a product company and they
| ultimately move once the product gets attention. You have
| to wait them out by being selective in how you burn your
| resources while developing a "brand" that's different from
| an agency.
|
| Be genuinely interested in solving the problems that your
| users have. Devtools have always been attractive as
| products to developers, but they are notoriously difficult
| to be successful with. You need to find all of the
| workflows that your users have and optimize them
| effectively. Sometimes the things that are needed are dull
| and boring, but if they visibly take someone's time then
| there is long-term value. Be careful about supporting
| esoteric approaches that will disappear, but also be aware
| that this can help with locking in some customers at the
| right point.
|
| Agencies tend to be bad at support. They are optimized for
| making new things and moving on. You have an opportunity to
| provide a strong support experience which is coupled with
| intelligence gathering on developer needs.
| mrtksn wrote:
| True but this is valid only for the established companies. A
| solo dev or bunch of people with a small seed round don't
| have any of that moat.
|
| AFAIK it's a common practice to copy up and coming indie
| games from the app store top charts because an established
| team would have the muscle to catch up and surpass the new
| ones. I don't see why wouldn't be possible to do it to any
| other product that is not an overnight success but shows
| healthy organic growth. I think this was also the idea behind
| huge early funding rounds, that is to create a large early
| success so that it's not copied right away.
| artembugara wrote:
| Indie game is where product = "company".
|
| Organic grows != "we just launch and see how users come to
| us"
|
| Huge early funding rounds = outstanding team +
| understanding of market + previous successful exits + 10B
| TAM
| mrtksn wrote:
| A healthy organic early growth implies product market
| fit, or at least some promising alignment. Unless it's
| technologically hard service, there's no moat that a well
| funded team can't replicate and surpass.
|
| Until they have sizeable operations, all startups are
| "company == product". They are pretty vulnerable of being
| copied.
| tlogan wrote:
| The company is more than "techology". It also marketing,
| sales, regional, leadership, market size, etc. That can
| be (and it is) a big moat preventing a well founded
| startup to replicate.
|
| In short one needs to have something is hard to replicate
| - but that does not need to be technology.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I know, the point is that at early stages there's little
| of it. That's when they copy you, just like that unless
| you have something else that's hard to replicate.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| I'd pay decent money for a Notion competitor that doesn't
| take 10+ seconds to load.
| dabedee wrote:
| Try getoutline.com. it's open source too.
| jcims wrote:
| It might be a way to alleviate some regret after the fact,
| but that type of thinking seems like a great way to induce
| paralysis.
| anandrm wrote:
| Every product is a copy of something .. You have a platform and
| build something new thats it ..
| josephd79 wrote:
| I know right, show me an application that hasn't already been
| made before? This is nothing new, been going on for the last
| 30-40 years.
| erikbye wrote:
| People tend to think startup or new product when they hear
| SaaS, and forget that many mature businesses are turning their
| domain software into a SaaS. This is currently huge. Internal
| software that was previously only used inside the company. Now
| they get to recoup on developer cost by opening it up to the
| market as a subscription service. At least that's the idea.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| Luck is also part of the equation, perhaps more than people
| want to acknowledge.
|
| To take Hacker News as an example, there are many excellent
| projects posted in the 'Show HN' section that get no traction
| at all. And then there a few lucky ones that suddenly take-off.
| There's no "wisdom of the crowds" moment that propels one
| project to success over another because it's more worthy or
| excellent - it really is random in so many cases.
|
| We think success = product excellence: how else could a product
| rise to a leading position in the market or to such pre-
| eminence unless it was better than the alternatives? But the
| mountain of successful products ranging from mediocre to
| terrible quality shows that product excellence isn't always the
| key ingredient to a product's success.
|
| Lest this all sounds too negative, I would never discourage
| anyone to pursue their product idea. But when it comes to
| promoting a product, developers should be cautious about
| relying on just one source for promoting their product (Hacker
| News, Product Hunt etc).
| lupire wrote:
| > exactly the same USP [uniqie selling proposition]
|
| hmm...
| afpx wrote:
| There have always been copycats. It's better to worry about
| usability and business model.
|
| Before Google became a monopoly, it was just one of many search
| vendors. Google's advantage was that they made search easy and
| simple enough for grandma to understand and use it.
| nogridbag wrote:
| Google's advantage initially was speed. The other search
| engines were slower on dialup and riddled with
| advertisements.
| enumjorge wrote:
| Google is not a technically simple product though, and not
| something a competitor could have copied in a matter of
| months.
| lumost wrote:
| Seems like this might be the driver behind longer timelines.
| Lean approaches work if you don't expect others to clone you
| and catch up. If you expect to have copy cats it's better to be
| 2 years ahead.
| daolf wrote:
| I believe that only a small fraction of SAAS ever makes it to
| HN and ProductHunt.
|
| HN and PH audience is 99% of Marketing and / or Tech people.
|
| Coincidentally, those people make product for Marketing and
| Tech people, and of course promote on website visited by
| Marketing and Tech people.
|
| But basically anything outside of those two realms feels
| completely under-addressed by SAAS:
|
| - industry - public services - waste management - etc
|
| mostly "unsexy things".
| cushychicken wrote:
| >HN and PH audience is 99% of Marketing and / or Tech people.
|
| That's why you should probably avoid posting here if you
| don't want copycats.
|
| Serve a totally different market, and make it to the front
| page of _that_ market 's HN. Then you're in business.
|
| You can post to HN as a victory lap/vanity metric when you've
| got a moat of traction. :)
| [deleted]
| mromanuk wrote:
| > But basically anything outside of those two realms feels
| completely under-addressed by SAAS: > - industry - public
| services - waste management - etc
|
| I hear this a lot. Couldn't be that everyone
| (makers/founders) addresses these PH/PH spaces because they
| are packed with early adopters instead of the other
| industries where every new innovation will be taken with FUD?
|
| And that's the cause that it's under-addressed. It's hard to
| convince "classic" industries to adopt new SW stuff and new
| paradigms.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The availability of SaaS is also a product the values of the
| various industries. There are lots of marketing-oriented SaaS
| because it's an easy market to sell to: they are very open to
| experimenting and taking risks, make decisions very quickly
| and have near limitless budgets. In industries where
| decisions happen slowly and budgets are limited it's harder
| to get a foothold, harder to grow, and if you do succeed
| you're less likely to be a fast-growing exciting startup that
| a venture-oriented place like HN talks about.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I still don't understand the purpose of Product Hunt - and I
| don't mean this in a sarcastic way. I'm hoping someone can tell
| me where it fits into the ecosystem vs. what I think my role
| is.
|
| I buy software, as a customer, both in my personal life as a
| consumer and also in my role at a tech company where I'd buy
| more B2B software. I don't use PH as a resource, but I hear
| about it a lot. What's it's role in the startup ecosystem /
| what am I missing out on?
| mderazon wrote:
| For me, PH is reduced to alternative.to these days. I only
| use it to research alternative products for ones that I know
| debarshri wrote:
| PH gives you a score, something #1 product of the day. It can
| be used as a benchmark or reference to investors and
| customers that this is product has a market need. It is
| kickstarter for software except the money part. It is also
| gives you some kind product and market validation. But like
| any other system, you can game it.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| > It can be used as a benchmark or reference to investors
| and customers that this is product has a market need.
|
| Is this actually true? The thing I'm trying to figure out
| is who is sitting in the audience at PH. Is it really
| potential customers, or networks of folks somehow connected
| to the poster that are there just to upvote? Am I atypical
| in not looking at PH when I'm interested in a solution to a
| problem I have? (I suspect I'm the norm)
| timdorr wrote:
| It's like Show HN and Reddit combined. Comments and upvotes
| on brand new products and services.
|
| For founders/makers, it's obviously a great source of
| traffic, leads, and exposure for your product.
|
| For users, it's more about being in on the ground floor with
| a hot new product. Sometimes that means getting an exclusive
| deal or free features. Other times it's just the exclusivity
| of being one of the first customers for something that may be
| very big one day (think lower user IDs on Twitter or GitHub,
| for instance).
|
| I think a lot of people like playing with new toys, and PH is
| a good way to do that without having to spend actual money
| buying something new to play with. I think it fits in the
| same niche as those that watch unboxing videos. It's fun to
| play with new stuff.
| extraAccount wrote:
| This comment made me realise how little software I actually
| buy. My most recent software purchase was a password
| manager subscription, a year ago. Otherwise I use the free
| version of tools and the G Suite. Whenever I go to a site
| like product hunt, I always wonder who buys it. I have to
| guess its mostly a b2b market.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| I guess I'll just have to concede not "getting it" - as a
| B2B buyer anyway.
| debarshri wrote:
| You are absolutely right. Sometimes, it is not about
| technically simple things. It can be complex but hot on trends.
| For instance, I have been tracking PaaS like platforms for past
| 2 years on hacker news. Every month, you have atleast one PaaS
| or on-prem heroku deployment platform on Show HN. Similarly, I
| see lot of airtable clones once in a while.
| amelius wrote:
| Personally, if something is easy to copy, I wouldn't want to
| work on it.
| corobo wrote:
| What are you working on?
| czbond wrote:
| I'm a founder at heart; I've loved creating - and have a software
| background. I really resonate with the paraphrased vibe of way,
| way more SaaS companies. I've been looking outside of SaaS to
| potentially harder science companies rather than SaaS for future
| endeavors.
|
| 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.
| fnord77 wrote:
| same boat. The enterprise SaaS market is so absurdly saturated
| and AWS/Azure/GCP have the shovel market locked up.
|
| Time for something completely different.
| acegopher wrote:
| I don't think SaaS and "potentially harder science companies"
| are necessarily opposed. I think there are still a lot of un-
| discovered niches that marry the two. Anything hard is going to
| take longer, but also result in less competition.
| shostack wrote:
| Can you help me understand how a billing model gets saturated
| exactly?
|
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| People talk like it's a vertical, but for plenty of people it
| actually translates to 'I want passive income'.
| onion2k wrote:
| There is nothing passive about running a SaaS business.
| czbond wrote:
| Agree - In the earlier days, it may have been semi-
| passive; today's landscape it most definitely is not!
| frogulis wrote:
| Here "passive" means something like "not tied to your
| active time", not "effortless".
| soared wrote:
| In this context saas isn't actually the opposite of say "one
| time purchase software" but more analogous to "low hanging
| fruit low cost easy problem to solve with software".
|
| IMO saas is muddled so it's meaning is not as much about the
| billing model anymore.
| pushrax wrote:
| Kind of? Companies like Salesforce, Shopify, etc. are still
| poster children of SaaS and their software is certainly not
| simple.
|
| There are definitely tons of the type of company you're
| talking about though.
| soared wrote:
| Agreed, definitely a kind of muddy term right now.
| czbond wrote:
| Agree - I use it as shorthand for software solving
| problems.
| czbond wrote:
| I personally use SaaS as shorthand for a business which
| mainly simplifies, eases, or improves business or personal
| problems or processes with software - and get paid for it.
| withinboredom wrote:
| My bank account is filled with SaaS products. Want to read
| the news, get a premium "bank" account, automate stuff, watch
| TV or movies, etc? pay up buddy. It's only a few more of your
| dollars a month.
|
| 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.
| azalemeth wrote:
| For me, it's the same problems but the opposite conclusion
| -- unless you're my rent, utility bills, a handful of
| subscriptions to print magazines or professional bodies (or
| my mother), you will _not_ get a subscription out of me. I
| will simply not do it. One-off payments are fine, but the
| expected cost of a subscription is huge over my lifetime
| and the value of your product probably isn 't worth it.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| This sentiment is common enough that it spawned the
| "build a B2B saas" advice.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| B2B SaaS have a much clearer/easier value proposition
| than B2C.
|
| 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.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| Do you have $10K in DVDs you will never watch again, like
| many renters do?
|
| You subscribe to your mother?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _People talk like it is a vertical._
|
| 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.
| czbond wrote:
| I understand your sentiment which I believed has a negative
| tone to founders that are more business focused - but I'll
| flip it.
|
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Other founders approach business AS the passion._
|
| 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.
| erikbye wrote:
| > It is too easy to: splash page, Wordpress, "rails new saas"
| for a product and then try to sell via SEO / outbound
|
| 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.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I'm willing to bet there are a reasonable number of people
| who are willing to pay $10 a month but would balk at a one
| off $100.
| pdimitar wrote:
| That's a very niche and small cherry-pick that you did.
|
| 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.
| playcache wrote:
| You build your SaSS applications about on wordpress?
| czbond wrote:
| No - but I've seen enough people begin that way.
| kakkan wrote:
| I relate with your sentiment. I'm from a product background,
| not a research one. What do you think is the best way to
| eventually transition into deep tech companies over the next
| five years?
| samhw wrote:
| What do you mean by 'deep tech'? And what role do you
| actually want to move into?
| roland35 wrote:
| I agree, I think it is way more competitive in any pure
| software cloud type space. I think if you can bring something
| else to the table such as hard science, domain expertise,
| hardware, or electronics, it may eliminate a lot of the
| competition.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I had a conversation with a traditional retailer who was afraid
| of using Heap for analytics because we used AWS for hosting,
| which is owned by Amazon, their biggest competitor.
|
| It sounds foreign now, but when AWS was new this happened all of
| the time: Companies who saw Amazon as a competitor in some way
| usually had someone, somewhere in management who was afraid of
| using anything hosted on AWS.
|
| It sounds silly now, but I remember having a lot of these
| conversations back when AWS was new. Typically, the older the
| company's management, the more likely they were to be afraid of
| using AWS for anything related to their business.
| jcims wrote:
| I wouldn't call it silly at all, it just depends on how
| strategic your failure is to Amazon's success. At some point
| you become materially exposed to their decision making.
| asdff wrote:
| It's not like AWS controls the sole source of fire. Companies
| these days have wised up and know they can roll their own 'good
| enough' solution and customers won't have much choice to do
| much about it but keep feeding the beast. I remember when I
| genuinely believed the netflix creation myth, of this fabled
| streaming service that would swallow up the world and have all
| movies and TV in one place. Companies who ultimately hold all
| this IP and have these heaps of cash wised up, wait on the
| sidelines, poach people, and come out with stuff like Peacock
| thats good enough, and customers have no alternative if they
| want to watch stuff that only comes to that particular
| platform. Streaming services are the most visible examples of
| companies rolling their own solutions to not be beholden to
| other companies, but its extending to all sectors of tech.
| danrocks wrote:
| On the streaming topic: piracy is becoming rampant again due
| to subscription fatigue and player fragmentation. So there
| _is_ an alternative if people don 't want to pay up.
| asdff wrote:
| No clue why MPAA couldn't pull an RIAA and have everything
| in one place like you see on apple music or spotify. 99
| million legitimate music streaming accounts in the U.S.
| today, what a number. The only service offering something
| similar for video is piracy software that manages to
| outclass every streaming service from all these multi
| billion dollar companies in ux.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Music is sufficiently low cost that the owners of music
| do not mind giving it up for less money.
|
| Owners of video media apparently want more money, and are
| betting they can earn more by not giving up control to
| others and selling for cheap.
|
| I am inclined to agree with the owners of video. If
| people wanted easy access to all the video/tv shows, they
| could right now pay the various services. It is not that
| time consuming or laborious, it just costs a hundred or
| two hundred dollars per month.
|
| The fact that people do not, means that people are not
| willing to pay that much per month (on top of tv service
| subscriptions, which come with live sports).
| asdff wrote:
| I think they are leaving a ton of money on the table
| acting this way, taking their ball and going home out of
| pride instead of making more money.
|
| For one, subscriber counts would go way up just like how
| literally 1/3 of Americans are allegedly legitimate music
| streamers, because paying one fixed price for literally
| almost all recorded sound is a pretty good deal in the
| eyes of consumers. For two, you'd end up with higher
| 'real' subscriber counts with a one stop service; right
| now its probably $90 a month at least for an individual
| to subscribe to all the popular streaming services which
| is why literally everyone I know is sharing account
| passwords with like three other people rather than
| shelling out the same price as the old evil cable bill.
| Personally, I'd be happy to pay $10 a month for a one
| stop shop and not have to deal with texting my brother to
| ask when he will be done watching Survivor on the shared
| netflix account.
|
| All this would add up to more customers lining up with
| more money, but its not done seemingly out of some false
| sense in these executives that their Disney+ or their
| Peacock will somehow capture market share (which by
| definition means securing more of the limited available
| popular IP) in a world where IP holders no longer play
| ball with eachother.
| danjac wrote:
| AWS' byzantine billing is also good grounds for reasonable
| caution, especially for a new startup.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Anyone in the traditional retail space is trying to avoid
| Amazon. A. Because anyone in the retail space likely DOES have
| older management, and B. They're not entirely wrong; even if
| Amazon doesn't pull the rug out from under them, they're still
| indirectly writing checks to help fund their largest
| competitor.
| option_greek wrote:
| Not silly at all. Premise is pretty simple: why would you fund
| your competitor's cash flow (either directly or indirectly).
|
| GCP and Azure successfully acquired a lot of retailers and
| ecommerce providers for this reason. This happens even today
| with medium to large size competitors of Amazon.
| bserge wrote:
| It sounded silly 5 years ago, now it sounds very smart.
| handrous wrote:
| This still happens. Same for GitHub/Microsoft and Azure.
| Probably Google, too, though I've not seen that personally.
| Haven't seen it for CloudFlare but there definitely _should_ be
| companies close enough to the spaces they 're growing into that
| they'd be well-advised not to send traffic through them if they
| can avoid it.
|
| There's probably room for niche services selling "we're not
| hosted on 'the cloud', aren't owned by anyone likely to be in
| competition with you, and control our hardware" but there's a
| lot of overlap there with companies/owners/managers who take
| this to the point of not trusting anything that isn't self-
| hosted (because there might be security problems, nevermind
| that DIYing is at least as likely to have such problems, or
| because they fear vendor lock-in to a perhaps unhealthy
| degree), so it might be a hard market to sell to.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| giving your customers to a 3rd party is never a wise choice.
| onion2k wrote:
| AWS promise they don't look at their customers data, but if it
| turns out they actually are then putting your Amazon-
| competitor-business analytics data in AWS would be incredibly
| bad for you.
|
| Would you really trust Amazon enough to take that risk?
|
| There would need to be an massively good reason to do that, and
| "incrementally better analytics" isn't it.
| htrp wrote:
| Except Amazon (retail) apparently does look at customer data
| to figure out what AmazonBasics products to launch
| oxfordmale wrote:
| AWS are not looking at customers data as it would be
| professional suicide. It would only require one disgruntled
| employee to leak this. Realistically they don't even have to
| as a proxies version of this data can be bought.
| jonahbenton wrote:
| The line that divides "the data of an AWS customer" from
| "the data of an AWS product" is rather faintly drawn. The
| latter is often sufficient proxy for the former to make
| business decisions on.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Exactly. It's like promising not to snoop phone
| conversations when all the valuable information is in the
| metadata, or like promising to avoid using swords in an
| era where people fight with guns.
| onion2k wrote:
| _AWS are not looking at customers data as it would be
| professional suicide._
|
| This is why it comes down to trusting Amazon. Essentially
| the question is "Do you trust Amazon not to do something
| that would be 'professional suicide', like accessing a
| rival company's AWS data, enough to risk giving them your
| data?" If you're running an online retailer that's a
| competitor to Amazon you should probably fall on the side
| of caution because companies do stupid shit all the time.
| noiwillnot wrote:
| There are plenty of reports of:
|
| - Amazon predatory pricing
|
| - Amazon trying to mistreat their workers (including AWS)
| as much as they can
|
| - Amazon/AWS copying products, FOSS software, and messing
| up with companies that they invest into.
|
| - Their complicity with all the scams going on their
| store.
|
| - And a big, big etc
|
| But, but, Amazon is not AWS! Amazon is retail and is a
| different environment! Yes, but it is under the same
| people.
| handrous wrote:
| Amazon's the scary-looking flea market on the wrong side
| of town with the barbed wire on the roof and a couple
| tough-looking guys conspicuously hanging out out front,
| with half the stalls full of stuff that definitely "fell
| off the back of the truck" and the rest selling fake
| Rolexes and shit.
|
| Doing that at scale doesn't make them _more_ trustworthy.
| Or it shouldn 't. Then again I guess if you're a super-
| creepy stalker at large enough scale then you're Facebook
| or Google and instead of getting probation and a
| restraining order you get billions of dollars, so maybe
| it _does_ work that way.
| qaq wrote:
| Why is it silly? you van use other clouds and not prop up your
| direct competitor
| raviparikh wrote:
| Agree that you can choose not to use AWS yourself if you see
| them as a competitor. But to refuse to use any service that
| itself uses AWS would severely limit who you can work with.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Most aren't in a position to insist but companies like
| Walmart do lean on vendors to provide a non-AWS version.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's like not buying a candy bar from the closest supermarket
| because you own one yourself (no matter how distant).
| htrp wrote:
| I think it's more like not buying Starbucks when you own
| your own coffeeshop...
| vmception wrote:
| Regarding growth sizes, the market is at a place where
| improvements are immediately applicable.
|
| Ask crypto/defi service providers how fast their organizations
| grow, people "ape" $2 billion into a product as consumers within
| days or minutes!
|
| It just gets leaner and faster!
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| My personal take as someone who is about to start their first
| SaaS: I'll simply be flattered if someone deems my product worth
| copying.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You will not be so flattered when you realize they've captured
| 90% of your potential paying users.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| I get that and I don't expect anything else but I don't
| really care, as I'm just a 1-man-army with 0 funds.
|
| 50 people - heck even 10 - who think my product is worth
| using and I'm happy. That's how low my expectations are, just
| to keep myself sane :)
|
| (I'm obv. not counting on this product making me a full-time
| income. I'm doing it for the experience and to get a feel for
| the industry.)
| mst wrote:
| Plus a lot of the time you're not competing against other
| companies with similar products so much as all of you
| collectively are competing against customers' in-house
| excel abominations.
| ElectricMind wrote:
| Imagine how many founder thought like you - "I'm obv. not
| counting on this product making me a full-time income"
| Because right now "context" your thinking is different. As
| soon as people taste the blood(success), it ain't this
| thinking anywhere. We are emotional being at core.
| Jealousy, greed, ambition affects everyone including
| Himalayan Monk.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Yeah, I'd love it if 10-50 paying users a month paid [part
| of] my bills. :D
|
| We'll see though, and you are right that keeping low
| expectations is a key.
| _benj wrote:
| I'm so with you!
|
| Even thought articles like these (and all the comments here)
| can give a lot of (good?) information, it can also create a
| bunch of paralysis.
|
| I'm also working on starting my first SaaS and I completely
| believe that "you don't learn until you launch".
|
| That my product is copied and 90% of my user have been
| captured? WOW! I came up and built an idea worth copying and
| with such potential on the market!? Let's do it again!
|
| I think this is also the freedom of no VC/investors asking for
| their ROI and an stable income. We can experiment, see what
| works and go from there. I'd also be flattered if my idea gets
| copied :-) I can learn from my competitor and grow even more!
|
| Good luck on your project!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-21 23:02 UTC)