
Founders on SaaS Platforms They Use - bgf419
https://www.marpipe.com/blog/saas-platforms-you-do-and-dont-need-right-now
======
virvar
We’ve gone from using four or five different team/project management SaaS
tools to using what’s coming with our already purchased office365 for business
subscriptions.

I know it’s anecdotal, and while it’s certainly great for us, it’s also quite
a lot of money that isn’t entering the market because things like teams and
planner are now standard products.

I think the next few decades will be increasingly hard for the SaaS market,
because big tech will simply implement the best ideas out there into their
current subscriptions.

~~~
arkitaip
It's not a popular opinion on HN but Microsoft really provides superior value
with Office 365 [0]. Even though the quality or usability of their products
aren't that great, it's good enough for most businesses, many which are too
busy getting work done or just surviving rather than evaluating the latest
collab/productivity darling that costs another 30-50 USD per employee.

[0] Zoho is the other alternative but even their offerings tends to become
expensive once you start using more than a single app.

~~~
legitster
I'll go further and argue that the quality of Office 365 is actually pretty
good, all things considered. A lot of people have bad experience with Office
because of all the legacy crap Office is tasked with dealing with, or all the
truly bizarre use cases thrown at it.

~~~
jasonv
Current versions of O365 work really well, especially if you spend time at an
organization still using pre-O365 versions of Office things.

I pay for O365, and G Suite and Adobe CC (among others) at our small shop. I
think G Suite could be the easiest to lose.

And I wouldn't have thought I'd prefer MS over G for Office stuff a year or
two ago.

~~~
randomsearch
Strong disagree if you’re using OS X. Apps are outdated, broken, poorly
designed.

~~~
jasonv
Personally, I’d rather use macOS Outlook or Outlook online than Outlook on
Windows. And not because of Windows.

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elliekelly
The point about choosing your bottlenecks carefully is so interesting. I
actually _love_ that Zoom automatically sets a time limit on free-tier calls.
I might even pay for that feature. The vast majority of meetings don’t need to
be a full hour but meetings always seem to go until someone has a hard stop.

Of course that’s the exact opposite of what Zoom is trying to accomplish in
cutting us off.

~~~
mattbee
Yes! I always thought it was a weird joke that they give away the feature that
makes you organise & focus your meetings, but charge for the one that lets
people ramble on forever.

~~~
sqs
If someone makes an open-source, easy-to-use, self-hosted API integration with
Zoom that lets me set time limits (with Google Calendar integration to
determine length) on Zoom calls and (1) somehow posts a warning ~5min before
the end and (2) terminates the call at the end, I would pay for it. (If
someone reading this is seriously interested in hacking on this, get in touch
with me by tagging me (@sqs) in a GitHub issue or something, and I can lay out
more detailed specs.) I don't want to pay more than one person for it, so I'm
not sure how to coordinate, but I would pay like $2000 USD.

~~~
bgroat
About to open a repo and tag you

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legitster
I've been in the marketing automation space for a while, and it's weird to me
for people to describe it as differentiated. There are 50 million different
companies in this space, and each one will tell you how beautiful and unique
they are, but they are incredibly hard to tell or even care about the
differences other than the flavor.

~~~
bgf419
"50 million different companies" = differentiated

If that many companies can survive in a single space, then that means there's
value in granular, incremental differences.

While I agree, most MarTech tries solving the same problem of 'make more money
faster'... so does pretty much every SaaS platform or business in general.

As far as feature differences, what would you consider a truly differentiated
market? I think there's a spectrum, but most markets are on a continuum more
than a discrete number line.

Thoughts?

------
bgf419
We're about to launch a SaaS platform into one of the worst economies of all
time. But like every startup, we think we've found the holy grail of tech -
something that every business will one day consider crucial to their success.
To find out what SaaS platforms companies currently find central to their
survival and which tech products are considered 'nice-to-have', we asked over
50 founders to tell us. Collectively, they mentioned more than 70 unique
platforms, 6 shades of Google, and several software transitions to free tiers
or cheaper alternatives.

~~~
sky_rw
"one of the worse economies of all time". What economy are you referring to?
Are you launching a SaaS in Venezuela?

~~~
bgf419
US too... which is where I'm from:
[https://www.bea.gov/news/glance](https://www.bea.gov/news/glance)
[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)

------
bgf419
Same post on Medium for those of you using Windows 7:

[https://medium.com/@brett_64626/what-we-learned-
from-50-foun...](https://medium.com/@brett_64626/what-we-learned-
from-50-founders-on-saas-platforms-they-still-use-ba93045bba86)

------
fireattack
The webpage doesn't render at all on both Chrome and Firefox:
[https://i.imgur.com/iclK6Dl.png](https://i.imgur.com/iclK6Dl.png)

~~~
kelnos
Given that you're claiming that it doesn't render on two popular browsers, one
of which I believe has the most market share of any browser, maybe your first
thought should be that there's something wrong with your setup?

~~~
fireattack
> maybe your first thought should be that there's something wrong with your
> setup

It is, but I tested in new, clean profile and it's the same. No error in
Network or Console either.

It looks like to me the font this page uses ("rubik") are just showing as
blank despite being a network resource.

I'm no webdev so this is the best I can do.

Edit: I think this font is just broken on Win 7:
[https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1137](https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1137),
at least the version hosted on Adobe Fonts which this webpage is using.

~~~
bgf419
thanks for pointing this out... I'll have the devs/design team take a look.
Ironically, we just switched from an expensive licensed font to the free
Rubik, so I guess we get what we pay for

