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Robin Islam
Apr 07, 2022
In General Discussions
Among the SaaS companies I serve, I recently discovered an interesting phenomenon: in addition to the original SaaS companies, there are more and more startups outside the SaaS circle. The experience of their founding team is not related to SaaS, mainly from other industries other than IT. For example: manufacturing, energy, food, photography, catering, equipment, printing, packaging, etc., which are equivalent to vertical fields in the SaaS category. Their common characteristics are: deep understanding of the industry, clear goals, pragmatic and not entangled in functions, low-key promotion, and steady development in their respective niche fields. For such SaaS startups, I call them +SaaS because they have the appeal to solve business problems first, and then realize the SaaS approach. In contrast, SaaS+, that is, starting from SaaS and finding a business area that can play a role. The emergence of +SaaS has brought a lot of new thinking to the domestic SaaS industry after the hustle and bustle, and may also generate new ways out. for example: Are there any new tracks in the SaaS field? Why is +SaaS easier to succeed? Why is SaaS+ Success More Difficult? 1. Is there a new track for domestic SaaS? Entrepreneurs often say that they are late and have not made the leading companies in popular tracks; other tracks are also overcrowded. In short, SaaS has no track, and starting a business is even more difficult. If we understand the track as a category of products, we will find that this is not the case. First of all, those +SaaS has already explained that there are countless vertical fields that have not been developed , because it is difficult for SaaS+ to discover and recognize them. Secondly, most of the Phone Number List popular tracks are the inheritance of the defined business of related software , such as Salesforce for CRM and Workday for HR. Therefore, the opportunities left for SaaS entrepreneurs are often subdivisions outside the software-defined business , such as Shopify, DocuSign, Concur, Twilio, etc. Some people have done statistics, about 60% of the existing SaaS are new categories other than software definition , and this proportion is still increasing. This shows that the entry point of SaaS entrepreneurs is mostly concentrated in new categories, rather than limited to the scope of the original software . The likely reason is that these tracks are narrow but not crowded because of their professional requirements. In the product era, it is not suitable to be a niche product because there are too few target customers; but in the service era, segmented services may have more customers . Finally, considering the characteristics of the domestic enterprise service market, that is, SMB accounts for the vast majority, the degree of enterprise informatization is low, the threshold for software use is high and the price is high, and the subdivision service is basically blank. Therefore, there should be many untapped tracks in the domestic enterprise service market. In this way, what SaaS entrepreneurship lacks is not a track, but experience and discovery.
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Robin Islam

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