13 traits of the perfect SaaS (from building 3 that actually worked)

As my co-founder and I are actively looking for our next SaaS acquisition at Wildfront, we decided to design our ideal SaaS over lunch earlier this week.

It took about 90 seconds, which was good - Having had two successful bootstrapped SaaS businesses in the past, and currently growing our 3rd, we're pretty clear and aligned on what works and what we want.

We then shared the results in our newsletter and community of SaaS founders and got some interesting responses, as every founder has different strengths and goals, which will in turn lead to different ideal SaaS criteria.

I wanted to share a snippet of the newsletter here and see what you would change?

Mac took a sip of his Best Day NA Kolsch and set it back on the table by the fire pit. It’s 1:00pm, and we’re sitting outside on a wonderful October afternoon, having lunch down the street from our office.

“We should just define the absolutely perfect SaaS”, he says.

I’m very down for this discussion.

“To build or to acquire?”

“Both.”

“Good idea. Hmmm… yeah, we define our ICP for sales purposes all the time, but I’ve rarely heard about mapping out the ideal SaaS business to own.” I whip out my iCloud Notes app. “Let’s talk it through and I’ll write it down as we go?”

And so, we bring to you our still-evolving rubric of what emerged from the discussion!

The Perfect Product
Knowing that we’d likely never get ALL of these things perfectly in one place, these criteria are roughly how we think of an ideal SaaS company to own:

• Has existing competition

• Sold to businesses (B2B), not consumers

• It’s easy to adopt but hard to leave

• Addressable market is below the size VCs care about

• Product has virality potential built in

• Customers are 50-1000 employee companies

• Distribution is primarily from organic search

• Not built with cutting-edge technology

• No third-party platform dependency

• Serves a well-defined need that is not a fad

• Serves a core utility, not a nice-to-have

• Doesn’t serve a mission-critical need with occasional urgent flare-ups (e.g. PaaS/IaaS)

• Priced at or well above $100+ per month per user

I should emphasize that we are purely bootstrappers and have no interest in raising money.

What criteria would you add/remove when building or buying a SaaS and why?

Full post is here.