[HN Gopher] Reselling Software: Don't Start a SaaS - White Label...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Reselling Software: Don't Start a SaaS - White Label Someone Else's
       Instead
        
       Author : peter_d_sherman
       Score  : 142 points
       Date   : 2022-06-12 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.sidehustlenation.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.sidehustlenation.com)
        
       | sputr wrote:
       | For a startup like ours (great product, traction, everything, but
       | we lack the funds to really get out there, sales wise) we would
       | LOVE to let a reseller use a white label version in markets that
       | we're not present yet (aka. including the US).
       | 
       | If anyone is interested in reselling a psychometrics for HR
       | processes SaaS (with scientifically valid, open source, computer
       | generated assessments, remote monitoring and O*NET sourced
       | profiles) - let me know.
        
       | mgbmtl wrote:
       | Or see it the other way around: if you have a SaaS, don't
       | underestimate resellers.
       | 
       | My company has its own product, but we also provide white-label
       | services to other companies. We're terrible at marketing, and
       | some of our partners operate in certain very specific niches,
       | with their pool of clients. It's a mutually beneficial
       | relationship.
       | 
       | (With the caveat that, if your aim is to build a pool of clients
       | to then sell the company, well, we don't 100% own these clients).
        
         | kenbolton wrote:
         | My business does exactly this. We have a very small sales team,
         | but the firms white-labelling us have tens-to-hundreds of folks
         | in sales and marketing, and sometimes provide a SaaS into which
         | they bundle our white-labelled product. Our ("our"?) sales
         | funnel is in the triple digits, and we have largely migrated
         | away from sales towards fulfilling orders. It is a wonderful
         | place to be!
        
           | nprateem wrote:
           | If I had to choose between owning the sales relationship or
           | the technology I know which I'd choose. Enjoy it while it
           | lasts.
        
             | ghaff wrote:
             | Pretty much any on-prem software vendor is some mix of
             | direct sales, partner sales, and through distribution. And
             | in the case of, say, a product primarily for SMBs, the mix
             | is probably going to tilt pretty heavily to partners.
             | There's a lot of leverage to using partners and many of
             | them will know and be connected to some market a lot better
             | than you do.
             | 
             | There are differences with SaaS but they may not be as big
             | as you think. For example, AWS mostly started as a go
             | online with your credit card sale. Now? They have a big
             | enterprise sales force and lots of partner relationships.
        
               | kenbolton wrote:
               | I bumped into a friend on the street a year ago he and
               | told me about the business he had recently co-founded and
               | taken through YC:
               | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/partnered. I told
               | my co-founder about it and it became a significant part
               | of his sales toolbox. I saw my friend last week and
               | shared the single criticism my co-founder had. My friend
               | told me they had recently been acquired by a competitor
               | whose core functionality resolved our pain-point.
               | 
               | Strategic partnerships and white-labelling seem to be
               | critical tools for growth in the current climate.
        
               | ghaff wrote:
               | Whether or not there's any white-labeling involved,
               | partnerships (VARs, SIs, now often public cloud
               | providers, etc.) have been a key part of sales strategy
               | for many types of products for decades.
        
             | kenbolton wrote:
             | We have our own customers, too. In addition, the folks
             | white-labelling use us in-house. We aren't strangers to the
             | companies receiving our white-labelled SaaS; we do the
             | initial customer on-boarding and provide all the higher-
             | tier support.
             | 
             | Eleven years and counting....
             | 
             | But hey, you do you! I will be long retired by the time
             | anyone gains traction with a competing offering. See you on
             | the beach!
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | koonsolo wrote:
             | I think it comes down to who is the most easy to replace.
             | 
             | If the sellers kind of have a big chunk of the market, and
             | can choose between vendors, you're indeed in a difficult
             | spot.
             | 
             | On the other hand, if the market has multiple sellers, and
             | you offer a unique technology, I wouldn't worry too much.
        
         | lagrange77 wrote:
         | As being also terrible in marketing..
         | 
         | What kind of SaaS is suitable for such a model? Any examples
         | maybe?
        
         | usaphp wrote:
         | How do you calculate pricing? I have a saas and a lot of
         | customers ask me for a white label solution, so they can resell
         | it to their own customers, but I always struggle with how do I
         | price it correctly.
        
           | dano wrote:
           | The standard structure is referred to as Value Added
           | Reseller's. Pricing and support is a balancing act because
           | the VAR owns the customer relationship, not your business.
           | Email me if you want to have a conversation as I ran a
           | business with VAR relationships as well as direct sales.
           | Email is in my profile.
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | Sounds like an MLM business...
        
           | bdcravens wrote:
           | MLM are about selling the pyramid. Partnerships are about
           | selling the products other produce.
        
           | jcims wrote:
           | It's a bog-standard value-added reseller (VAR) model that has
           | been around for decades. It actually can be a great thing
           | because most industries have idiosyncrasies that can benefit
           | from a focused approach from the vendor/reseller.
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | ascendantlogic wrote:
           | Without the "ML". The goal is to resell the software, not
           | recruit people below you to resell and recruit more people,
           | etc.
        
           | butbutbut123456 wrote:
           | Microsoft does this really well.
           | 
           | Channel sales are important. When other people get rich off
           | you, you get rich too.
        
           | giaour wrote:
           | You need more levels for that. Resellers in the model
           | described by the GP make their money by selling the product,
           | not by recruiting more resellers.
        
       | hedora wrote:
       | SaaSaaS
        
         | bornfreddy wrote:
         | SaaS as a Service? Sounds fitting.
        
         | frittata wrote:
         | is that pronounced sassass?
        
       | greenbit wrote:
       | Where is the value added, in this? Looks like a means to un-
       | earned income for a very few, by driving up costs for the vast
       | majority.
        
         | Rastonbury wrote:
         | Did you read the article? It's not pirating and selling as
         | yours, its reselling. Resellers exist for almost every kind of
         | product or service. The original provider gets more sales, the
         | reseller makes money from taking a cut, the customer gets the
         | product/service. Manufacturers and service providers need
         | distribution, resellers provide this. It's like paying a
         | Chinese company to slap your own logo on a doodad and selling
         | it on Amazon.
        
           | ForHackernews wrote:
        
           | HWR_14 wrote:
           | The point the are claiming is that resellers don't produce
           | anything or add value. They would almost certainly agree with
           | your Chinese/Amazon analogy and also condemn the resellers
           | doing that. It's a common opinion among those who build stuff
           | for a living and aren't responsible for marketing those
           | things.
        
             | rusticpenn wrote:
             | The resellers take care of marketing your product in a
             | market where you probably don't have any presence.
        
               | HWR_14 wrote:
               | Sometimes. Sometimes they snipe you. But yes, I agree
               | resellers have value. I'm just saying people who've never
               | tried to sell a product rarely see it.
        
         | ageyfman wrote:
         | The value is that marketing & sales are easily the harder
         | discipline for most SaaS businesses.
        
           | tommiegannert wrote:
           | There's also customer support. A B2B software vendor might
           | want to let someone else do a B2C or B2B in some niche they
           | don't have time for.
        
           | bdcravens wrote:
           | Exactly. Why wouldn't you want to increase your sales reach?
           | I think there's a subconscious bias on HN and similar spaces
           | against anything that indicts the "if you build it they will
           | come" dream.
        
       | kamma4434 wrote:
       | My company does this. Apart from our main market, we have a
       | significant number of white labellers who work in the telco space
       | and need Stu else to sell in order to get better revenue or to
       | offer more services.
       | 
       | From what I'm understanding, they are doing pretty well. They
       | wouldn't make enough money to justify developing the product on
       | their own, but they definitely make good margins.
       | 
       | We develop a system to add contact centers aimed at SMB's for
       | telcos, so it's very niche - https://www.queuemetrics-
       | live.com/resellers.jsp
        
         | kimi wrote:
         | Selling stuff != developing stuff. If you can develop and they
         | can sell (and I guess you'd develop the product in any case)
         | it's a win-win.
        
       | personjerry wrote:
       | Well, wrong audience here. That's doing all of the hard work
       | (marketing, selling) without any of the fun (engineering).
        
         | BenoitP wrote:
         | I was wondering: is there a community online like HN for
         | marketers?
        
           | Moto7451 wrote:
           | Product Hunt has a low code and non-eng community that
           | includes that demographic.
        
           | newsclues wrote:
           | I'll (build one) and grand you premium access to one for a
           | modest fee...
        
           | yakshaving_jgt wrote:
           | You might be interested in https://barnacl.es/
           | 
           | Not much recent activity though.
        
           | bornfreddy wrote:
           | https://www.indiehackers.com/ comes to mind.
        
         | hedora wrote:
         | Actually, this is the perfect audience. Design and price your
         | SaaS with the sales channel in mind.
         | 
         | Also, choose your channel wisely. For example, maybe randos
         | working part time out of cars is the right choice for
         | small/local business reputation management software.
        
         | PainfullyNormal wrote:
         | It sounds like fantastic practice for those of us who want to
         | learn something new (marketing, selling) without letting
         | ourselves get distracted with the comfortable, safe stuff we
         | already know (engineering).
        
         | [deleted]
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | jollofricepeas wrote:
       | The biggest unlock that most HNers will miss in this article is
       | what the guy did for lead generation.
        
         | jqpabc123 wrote:
         | The biggest unlock that most HNers will miss in this article is
         | that this guy isn't selling software, he is selling marketing.
        
         | mickael-kerjean wrote:
         | "He would sit in his car at lunch and cold call roofers,
         | plumbers, dentists, and other small businesses he saw as
         | potential customers."
        
       | tyingq wrote:
       | I'm surprised it doesn't mention selling "mash ups". I imagine
       | there's some opportunities to talking to one service and
       | decorating it with associated data from another service. Or even
       | just better thought out aggregated services from one provider. I
       | suppose then it's engineering, but the kind of thing an out of
       | the box api proxy could do with just configuration.
       | 
       | A proxy would also open up opportunities like serving cached
       | responses for more static calls, which would raise your margin.
        
         | judge2020 wrote:
         | > I suppose then it's engineering
         | 
         | Careful, that's supposed to stay a secret!
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31226100
        
         | dc-programmer wrote:
         | I was exposed to the idea of reverse ETL recently. The essence
         | of the paradigm is to have a workflow that retrieves data from
         | your SaaS APIs, transforms and enriches it, and then ingests
         | this data into other SaaS providers in order to automate
         | various backend workflows.
         | 
         | In a way it's similar to a gateway in that you are composing
         | different backend targets. Although it might just be a
         | marketing neologism describing middleware.
        
           | maxerickson wrote:
           | I continue not to understand the "reverse" in that name.
           | 
           | Like if you aren't already doing "transform", you probably
           | aren't reversing it.
        
             | ethbr0 wrote:
             | Parent didn't chose the best starting place to illustrate.
             | 
             | Typically, reverse ETL starts with "all of my data is
             | already in an EDW" and goes to "I want to push it to my
             | various app systems."
             | 
             | Canonical example: pushing system of record information to
             | Salesforce to speed and enrich the sales cycle.
             | 
             | https://hightouch.io/blog/reverse-etl/
        
               | dc-programmer wrote:
               | My bad. My introduction to the topic was through the lens
               | of different use cases
        
               | ethbr0 wrote:
               | Np! Wasn't intended as a slight. We all come into new
               | things the way we do, rarely via the textbook definition
               | (which typically doesn't even exist when we're first
               | doing it!).
        
             | dc-programmer wrote:
             | I'll concede that the E, the T, and the L are the only
             | operations I see in this model
        
             | renewiltord wrote:
             | Traditional ETL tools focused on getting data out of
             | services and into a few places like a relational DB, S3, or
             | some other such aggregated storage so they were read-only
             | from services and read/write to DBs.
             | 
             | Reverse ETL is marketing to differentiate to the customer
             | that you're pushing data into services as well, so that
             | it's read/write to all.
             | 
             | Of course the concept is amusing to someone talking about
             | ETL, but the market moved at some point to refer to the
             | first functionality as ETL and so this is just a change to
             | differentiate.
        
         | dc-programmer wrote:
         | Someone should create a startup that offers SaaS attribute
         | entity resolution in Log4j
        
       | al_borland wrote:
       | The company I work at has a couple offerings that are just
       | branded versions of software from other companies. It isn't
       | great. When there are bugs, issues, or feature requests, you
       | can't fix them, you can only try and hope that the developers
       | will fix them. But your priorities aren't their priorities. And
       | if you make tweaks on your own, good luck getting vendor support
       | after that. They will just blame all the issues on your changes
       | (rightfully so). Internally, hundreds of people have pleaded for
       | my company to start making our own competitor instead of
       | continuing to just rebrand this other piece of software. Now the
       | vendor is changing their entire business model, so we basically
       | just have to send our traffic to them so we have 0 control of the
       | customer experience at that point.
       | 
       | This just seems like a "get rich quick with no effort" article,
       | but I guess I shouldn't expect anything different from a site
       | like "side hustle nation". Maybe white label software will become
       | the new drop shipping... which is also awful for anyone who
       | actually cares about their customers and the quality of the
       | product they ship.
        
         | dzhiurgis wrote:
         | > hundreds of people have pleaded
         | 
         | IMO your company just made wrong decision buying whatever you
         | stuck with. I have a feeling this is about much smaller
         | companies.
        
         | kenbolton wrote:
         | We are careful not to play favorites with customers, whether
         | the relationship is direct or through a reseller. Success for
         | our resellers translates into success for us. Every unit sold
         | matters. Every relationship matters. Critically, every re-order
         | matters. We prefer to smother every relationship with unfailing
         | responsiveness. We never say, "no", but we do say, "not now".
         | The (vanishingly) few customers we have lost, we go through an
         | all-hands soul-searching to understand the "why". Our group and
         | individual integrity is, at the end of the day, the only thing
         | we really have.
         | 
         | I want to point out that "side hustle" should not be a dirty
         | word. I introduce myself as a professional sea kayak instructor
         | and guide with a side hustle as a founding software engineer.
         | My colleague introduces himself as a sea kayak instructor and
         | guide with a side hustle as a high school math teacher and
         | director of the school district's drama program. Autobiography
         | is a skill we should all practice; how you write and speak
         | about yourself translates quickly into who you will become.
        
           | al_borland wrote:
           | >I want to point out that "side hustle" should not be a dirty
           | word.
           | 
           | You're right, but it has become very much associated with
           | people trying to "hack" work to generate "passive income",
           | which usually means something that is a borderline scam.
           | 
           | Sea kayak instructor/guid, math teacher, and software
           | engineer all sound like perfectly respectable ways to earn
           | money. Most "side hustle" bloggers are pushing things like
           | drop shipping, YouTube Shorts/TikTok that just steal content
           | from other people, being a middleman for credit card
           | processing, crypto/NFTs, arbitrage plays that involve gutting
           | store inventory or show tickets that hurt normal consumers
           | (if people want to do the work to hit up garage sales and
           | stuff that's fine), etc.
           | 
           | That being said, I do like the idea of leading with your
           | passion instead of what would generally be considered your
           | primary job. It gives people a lot better idea of who you
           | are, or at least what you'd actually want to talk about.
        
             | kenbolton wrote:
             | Totally agree! I live in my own bubble and discount
             | everything written on the internet by some (often
             | arbitrary) percentage. (Dons flame-retardant suit.) I
             | double that percentage if Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen have
             | skin in the game in the last five years. (I admit they both
             | had good ideas and implementations, but those feel like
             | ancient history.)
             | 
             | Straight talk, though: software engineering feels like a
             | "hack". I spend a few hours a day making modest adjustments
             | to a SaaS (that adds real value for our customers) and the
             | income feels passive. I spend several hours outside, where
             | the solutions to the software engineering problems reveal
             | themselves.
             | 
             | I take Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Development" as a
             | metaphor for, in my case, "Kayak Driven Development".
        
         | repomies69 wrote:
         | It sucks from employee perspective, but the thing that matters
         | in the end is what you see under the bottom line. I'm pretty
         | sure this is financially the most sensible option for many
         | companies in certain niches. Doesn't mean it is necessarily
         | nice thing to work with, which can be quite different thing.
        
       | a4isms wrote:
       | Meta-comment:
       | 
       | The author is relating second-hand information. That's useful,
       | it's good to have people who have a skill of curating business
       | advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand
       | advice is to recognize the difference between:
       | 
       | Alice: "I'm making five figures a month for five hours a week
       | reselling five products."
       | 
       | And Bob: "People like Alice make as much as five figures a month
       | for five hours a week reselling five products."
       | 
       | In the first case, Alice has direct experience with success. In
       | the second case, the incentives are such that Bob is someone
       | whose experience and expertise is in selecting stories that have
       | _verisimilitude_ , that is, things that sound true.
       | 
       | And what makes something sound true? Quite often, something we
       | want to be true sounds true even if it isn't, and something we
       | don't want to be true doesn't sound true, even if it is.
       | 
       | Bob nearly always sounds more authoritative than Alice, because
       | Bob's business is sounding authoritative, whereas Alice's
       | business is being authoritative. Why doesn't Alice always sound
       | authoritative? Because she speaks the truth whether it appeals to
       | our biases or opposes them, whether we want her truth to be true
       | or not.
       | 
       | Bob, on the other hand, is an authority on what people want to
       | hear. Bob is just as expert in Bob's business as Alice is in
       | hers. Bob uses metrics and data to write headlines and even
       | choose the most compelling adjectives to use in his posts. Bob
       | sounds authoritative to people lacking expertise in whatever Bob
       | is talking about.
       | 
       | The Bobs of this world can (but don't always) become "a poor
       | man's idea of a rich man, and a failure's idea of a success,"
       | because their customers are people early in their lives and
       | careers.
       | 
       | So what to do when a Bob suggests something is true? Well, we
       | shouldn't dismiss it. But let's think of it the way we'd think of
       | Bob referring a candidate for a job in our businesses.
       | 
       | We might fast-track them into an interview, _but we'd still
       | interview the candidate_. And so it must be with business advice.
       | Bob pointing us to an idea is Bob referring an idea to us.
       | 
       | Our job is to take Bob's referral and still validate the idea by
       | seeking original, authoritative expertise. Bob's value is
       | suggesting ideas to think about, not teaching us about business.
       | 
       | p.s. I say all of the above as an authority on the subject: I'm a
       | Bob.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | smashah wrote:
       | Most of my revenue comes from companies that basically resell my
       | product with some cherry on top specializations for their local
       | markets. I have managed to develop a mechanism (also just the
       | nature of the product) that charge per end user so it's protected
       | against exploitation. No marketing/landing page required on my
       | end, my clients end up making avg. 6x on top. win win.
        
         | rr808 wrote:
         | This is actually a great business model. Most Americans
         | underestimate how big the world is. You'll never be #1 in
         | Brazil and Pakistan and the Philippines, South Africa, Egypt
         | etc etc if you do it yourself, but resellers can make a great
         | living off that.
        
         | ako wrote:
         | Is it saas? How do you enable your customers to specialize your
         | software?
        
           | InvaderFizz wrote:
           | I work for a SaaS that explicitly allows reselling and
           | rebranding.
           | 
           | We change a few variables for what color scheme and theme is
           | applied, what support docs are linked, and what which domain
           | names are used. Other than that, there is very little code
           | difference between what we sell direct and what the resellers
           | present to their clients. Some of those resellers are big
           | names with enterprise reach that we will never have. In the
           | end, it all works just fine for us.
        
       | MyFirstSass wrote:
       | I have done the exact opposite!
       | 
       | Does anyone know if there's any value in a 5+ year old 95%
       | working SaaS web-app with a "very messy" codebase?
       | 
       | I personally have two systems (my first attempts at live SaaS
       | systems) that have been just closed but have been working "live"
       | for 5+ years- both made in Laravel with Angular 1.4 front ends,
       | they look good! - but the codebase is "a pile of patches on top
       | of a chaotic prototype".
       | 
       | One is a system made for physician doctors training courses; you
       | can make groups, set up courses with calendars, send invite
       | e-mails, and they can turn in papers and teachers can grade them,
       | make pdf's of the papers, set up calendars with files for the
       | students etc.
       | 
       | The other is an accreditation system, you can create an
       | application template and invite users to fill in the application
       | with a sleek interface with autosave etc, and have other people
       | grade the applications.
       | 
       | I don't have time to maintain either system and have been
       | wondering if the systems should be just retired or could be
       | resold somehow, even if the codebase is not in shape to be "taken
       | over" easily. A huge amount of works has gone into them.
       | 
       | Have anyone been in similar situations and have advice? :)
        
         | ozten wrote:
         | You could list them on Flippa, Microaquire, etc. You could get
         | a few thousand dollars for the codebase potentially. This may
         | not seem like much, but they buyer will have a massive amount
         | of work ahead of them to find product/market/distribution
         | channel fit.
         | 
         | [1] https://flippa.com/
         | 
         | [2] https://microacquire.com/
        
         | somberi wrote:
         | So we are clear, I do not profit from this. Happy to take a
         | look and if relevant connect you to a friend who is using
         | something similar at a large scale. IF interested, email is in
         | my profile.
        
         | di4na wrote:
         | The most important question is... does it makes money.
         | 
         | If yes, then reselling is totally possible. The price may be
         | lower due to the shape of the codebase, this is a discussion to
         | be had. There are definitely people interested in taking this
         | kind of system and keeping them alive longer, if not investing
         | in straightening them out.
         | 
         | All depends on what value they find in them.
        
         | lelanthran wrote:
         | > I don't have time to maintain either system and have been
         | wondering if the systems should be just retired or could be
         | resold somehow, even if the codebase is not in shape to be
         | "taken over" easily. A huge amount of works has gone into them.
         | 
         | How big is the userbase, how much do they pay, and how long
         | have they been using this?
         | 
         | Products are frequently worth nothing, but lots of people would
         | be interested in buy an existing pool of paying customers.
        
         | hobobaggins wrote:
         | > A huge amount of works has gone into them.
         | 
         | "work" has no value on its own. Work is the function; it is the
         | output of that function that may have value. The difficulty is
         | in figuring out who would value it the highest.
         | 
         | For example, an existing customer base is valuable, especially
         | if paying. A working and nice-looking UI, even with a poor
         | backend, is valuable. The combination together might be
         | valuable.
         | 
         | A line of code doesn't have a lot of value, which means that a
         | large company might easily replace a poor backend by throwing
         | some developers at it. Most people buy what they can see, and
         | what they can see in this case is a "look good" front-end that
         | are working "live" for 5+ years.
         | 
         | You should probably contact your largest competitors's
         | partners/alliance/business development teams. Something might
         | develop. Approach it as a partnership and alliance, and
         | something might work out. One more thought, given that this is
         | HN: companies don't actually negotiate with other companies,
         | but: people negotiate with people. That's 90% of sales right
         | there... being human and talking to other humans.
        
         | cercatrova wrote:
         | Try MicroAcquire. Although you'd have a bit better luck if they
         | were already generating revenue, they do have sellers selling
         | pre-revenue SaaS as well.
        
       | baasically wrote:
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | pvg wrote:
         | _Please don 't pick the most provocative thing in an article or
         | post to complain about in the thread. Find something
         | interesting to respond to instead._
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
           | baasically wrote:
        
       | airocker wrote:
       | It would be great to hear the trade offs from the perspective of
       | original saas developer. How to make the best of it and not get
       | conned.
        
       | techlatest_net wrote:
       | Shameless plug here. We are on the other side of this model where
       | we have bunch of applications [0] available in AWS, Azure, GCP
       | cloud marketplace which are very good candidates for white
       | listing / VAR . Feel free to reach out to us (contact in profile)
       | if any one is interested in reselling our products.
       | 
       | [0] AI/ML multi user development environment :
       | http://www.techlatest.net/support/jupyter_python_notebook_su...
       | Web based Ansible environment :
       | http://www.techlatest.net/support/ansible_tower_support/
       | Metabase, opensource alternative for data visualization :
       | http://www.techlatest.net/support/metabase/ R-Studio for data
       | science & data visualization :
       | http://www.techlatest.net/support/r-studio-support/
        
       | aruanavekar wrote:
       | Mixed thoughts here. If you have an idea of SaaS that exists in
       | the domain/industry and not addressed for years and see an upward
       | trend of adoption, then start one, execute it and maybe white-
       | label your product to big brands that are usually slow to execute
       | SaaS.
       | 
       | Be a Hubspot or resell Hubspot? Be Zoom or Ringcentral?
       | (Ringcentral whitelabels Zoom)
       | 
       | Do not build another SaaS CRM and call it Web3 CRM :)
        
         | ackbar03 wrote:
         | That doesn't actually sound like a bad idea, slapping web3 onto
         | whitelabel software and selling at a premium. Heck some vc
         | might even fund you to cold call clients out of your car at
         | lunch time!
        
           | grogenaut wrote:
           | of the folks who left my work recently (6-8 months) theyre
           | mostly selling crypto shovels.
        
             | demopathos wrote:
             | It's great utility indeed.
        
       | CodeSgt wrote:
        
       | stuven wrote:
       | A startup (series A-B) I worked for was basically a thin wrapper
       | providing physical goods around the core features of a delivery
       | SaaS (series A) - our core features were so entwined with theirs
       | that when they went belly-up, we panicked and bought their source
       | code for an ungodly sum. Then we took over hosting their product
       | for just ourselves, and so had to learn how to run _their_
       | software too. It was written in a different language than most of
       | our engineers knew, and had pretty much no documentation. We
       | didn't know enough about their software to fix new bugs easily as
       | they came up, and didn't have enough `people * time` to figure
       | out enough to fix the old ones.
       | 
       | Entwining our business with theirs was a good way to get off the
       | ground. But when they crashed they nearly took us with them.
        
         | hinkley wrote:
         | Did you end up making money off that product line?
         | 
         | I've worked at a couple places where the business folk sold our
         | product below cost, and some of our customers built their whole
         | roadmap around us, while we quietly ran out of money.
         | 
         | Without the middleman, you maybe pulled it off.
        
         | onmobile2022 wrote:
         | This is a great parable in the making, something something
         | depending on vendor APIs
        
           | rapind wrote:
           | Not always a bad thing though. I know the Stripe connect API
           | so well at this point I could move payment processing in
           | house based on their data structures and save money on fees.
        
       | braingenious wrote:
       | This reminds me of those "The Rich Jerk" style get-rich-quick
       | "courses" that were popular in the early '00s.
       | 
       | This content is utterly devoid of anything of value and is chock
       | full of highfalutin promises of untold wealth, just listen to my
       | podcast, sign up for my newsletter, click my affiliate links, buy
       | my book, tweet about my blog, upvote me on HN!
        
       | einpoklum wrote:
       | > Reselling software gives you many of the benefits of a software
       | business, without ... development cost.
       | 
       | This sound fishy.
       | 
       | > That means you can enjoy recurring revenue, selling one product
       | to multiple customers
       | 
       | This is immoral and socially harmful.
       | 
       | > and strong profit margins by white labeling a software tool
       | that already exists.
       | 
       | This is incestuous and immoral. Just make your software free and
       | be done with it.
       | 
       | > These benefits are what attract many people to starting a SaaS,
       | or software as a service,
       | 
       | Many gold-diggers hustlers maybe.
       | 
       | > After all, there may already be a tool that solves the same
       | problem. Could you become a software reseller instead of a
       | software creator?
       | 
       | If you don't want to do an honest day's work, then maybe.
       | 
       | > To help me learn more about reselling software (also known as
       | white labeling), I connected with Chris Lollini. Chris is a self-
       | described "recovering engineer" who started a marketing agency as
       | a side hustle 9 years ago.
       | 
       | hustle is the appropriate term.
       | 
       | > That agency evolved into a multi-6-figure white labeling
       | operation called Reputation Igniter.
       | 
       | Well, this certainly ignited that Lollini guy's reputation as far
       | as I am concerned.
        
       | kappuchino wrote:
       | Honestly, I'm confused. This is at #13 at my time of writing.
       | Never seen such low quality post (from my point of view) that
       | high up and discussed like it adds value top ... what? whom?. Is
       | this the eternal september Moment of hacker news?
        
         | dgellow wrote:
         | People upvote the headline, not the article content
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | melony wrote:
       | You don't even need to white label, the situation in scientific
       | software is so bad that even a a slightly nicer UI + managed
       | hosting (with typical enterprise SaaS level of data
       | security/compliance) will net you many laboratories as customers.
       | Unfortunately it requires significant domain knowledge which
       | poses a challenge. The intersection between frontend UI people
       | and scientific software developers is non-existent (outside of
       | Matlab and Wolfram).
        
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