
Building a SaaS business - 2007 vs 2013. - logicman
http://sahilparikh.com/post/46741689726/building-a-saas-business-2007-vs-2013#.UVkmh6uPhJE
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patio11
It is absolutely true that everything about 2013 is superior to 2007 for SaaS
businesses, with the debatable exception of the amount of competition in any
niche/vertical. It is _also_ true that the best time to start a SaaS business
for the 2013 market was 2007 (or as earlier as you can push it). You get a
head start on the learning curve, which is formidable, even with lots of
people generously sharing what they know about customer acquisition, technical
topics, etc etc etc. It is virtually impossible to read your way to scalable
customer acquisition (or any other very worthwhile business goal). Past the
high-basic/low-intermediate level you have to put things into practice in your
own business and see how they work out. In 2007, virtually anybody doing that
was breaking new ground for the industry. In 2013, only _most_ people doing
that will break new ground for the industry. It's _ridiculous_ how much we
don't know yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How times have changed.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
ams6110
Task management is like losing weight. Everyone knows the real answer is a
little self-discipline, but nobody likes to hear that so they keep buying the
latest new app hoping that THIS one will be the silver bullet. The fact that
none of them really work any better than a simple to-do list is what makes
them addicting. The rush of trying the new thing, followed by the let-down.
It's just like drug addiction.

