
Ask HN: SaaS+experts flavor of startups? - vermorel
A few years ago when I founded Lokad.com, I would have described this business as B2B SaaS for inventory forecasting. However, nowadays, pure SaaS is only a tiny fraction of our business: we primarily sell a combo SaaS+experts with a very hands-on approach.<p>I am wondering how this flavor of software company gets commonly named or described?<p>What Lokad does would be akin to buy an AdWords package where Google would also provide an in-house expert to entirely run the account. Since we do inventory optimization, Lokad does not have the obvious conflict of interest that Google would have, but other than that, the degree of technicality involved is not dissimilar to what you would expect from managing an AdWords account.<p>A few salient elements:
- the Lokad team is, by far, the No1 user group of our own software.
- client discussion typically starts by defining relatively open goals.
- we &quot;negotiate&quot; a lot of the business trade-off with the clients.
- the client may almost never touch the app if only to download results.<p>We are not consultingware, the app is multi-tenant and fairly packaged. We are not a consulting agency either, as the business remains dominantly a software business (high ratio of developers, etc).
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sharemywin
My two cents: Thing is it's not SaaS software because the value in SaaS is
near 0 marginal costs to add new users(outside marketing). Also, it sounds
like you have a niche type of user. So, the virility factor would probably be
lower(lower marketing costs). Not to say you can't build a big business just
outside financing would be difficult and of little value. If you try to grow
to fast and can't train your experts properly you will lose customers. And if
you growing at a decent pace anyway you only save a couple of years to give up
a bunch of your company.

