Fundamentals of a calm SaaS business
Calm SaaS businesses have a few unique properties that make for smoother sailing than other kinds of entrepreneurial efforts. In this article, I dive into:
- Low-touch vs. High-touch
- Configuration, Customization, Integration
- Cloud-hosted vs. On-Premise
Enjoy!
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Interested post, I like the part that the content is available in three different formats. I always prefer audio over reading.
How do you find the balance between a low-touch model that scales and providing the high-touch experience that some clients may require?
Great read, thanks for sharing! Some valuable insights in there. Agree with the high-touch versus low-touch, but sometimes I think it's valuable to start a SaaS with the high touch model in mind because then those customers will likely be customers for life, give you the best testimonials, and just give you more social proof.
I really enjoyed this post and it makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people in the startup world get caught up in the hustle and bustle and forget that a business needs to be calm and sustainable in order to be successful in the long run.
Who's building on-premise software in 2022?
There are corporations that will literally pay you (and I mean: bank roll it entirely) to develop an on-prem version of your SaaS app.
On-prem will always be a thing. Security concerns are real. And any corp's security division will have tremendous sway over their decision making.
There are tons of companies exclusively working in this on-prem market, and it is extremely lucrative.
I was considering this a few weeks ago. Atlassian is moving cloud only, and my client has to move from on-premise servers to the cloud if they want to keep getting updates. Maybe there is a market for a bootstrapper making Jira/Bitbucket/Confluence clones explicitly for on-premises. Like making that your USP. You can not get this in the cloud, only on-premise.
P.S. I do not know if Gitlabs is on-premise. I can imagine this being a big competitor.
I would bet there could be a market for this - it would probably just be a matter of whomever has the most connections and financial capital to quickly move on it. I just did a search on Google and didn't really find anything for "on-prem agile project management". Interesting...
Microsoft Project seems like it's the de-facto on-prem project management tool but I can't imagine it being super effective in an Agile environment.
There's like a simultaneous tug-of-war game between bringing everything to the cloud (at the request of engineering) and bringing everything on-prem (at the request of security).
At the last company I worked at, you would generally see that the giant mega market cap corporations are the ones that are looking to on-prem all of their operations. They're willing to spend significant sums of money to do this, too.
I think this sort of thing generally happens throughout the lifetime of a company/corporation when it becomes more important and cost efficient to protect existing IP, than it is to facilitate innovation.
I forgot about Microsoft Project. I have heard about it but never used it. It did remind me of something I did use: Perforce Helix. It is good with digital assets. Think of 3D models for games etc.
It is likely that this type of application would need a sales team visiting trades shows etc. as its primary marketing/sales channel.
For indie-hackers just starting out though? Cloud seems to be the default choice until you reach the enterprise level.
is that rhetorical question or you are actually asking?
I thought on-premise software was reserved for the enterprise level at this point.
Surprised to hear that there are founders who are installing on-premise software from day one.
so certain class of software for e.g. anything dealing with source code i.e linters, static analysis tools, CI, CD etc. always require on-premise since companies are afraid their code can be leaked. Same holds for regulated industries as well.
And on premise is also different in the sense that what is meant is that requests will not go outside their virtual private cloud. So it may be hosted in aws server managed by the company. This is a requirement even for small vc funded companies with 3-5 people in B2B space. Its more common than we think of generally because B2C is more prevalent.
thanks for the detailed response
I work in SaaS sales and a lot of what you describe resonates.
Do you see a world where automation will take over the majority of the sales process? Or , no matter how good the tech in SaaS sales, a human-touch will always be required?
I assume that for low-touch SaaS, sales automation will keep taking over. We'll see more discovery platforms like AppSumo tapping into these sales channels, consolidating subscriptions even more.
For high-touch SaaS, the sales process will remain based on trust between human(-like) parties. I can imagine AI-assisted sales conversations, customer service facades where first-level support isn't a bot but a near-human AI, and things like that. But the "high ticket" prices will usually include a person.
We might see a cheap version that's AI-driven and a more expensive human touch in both low- and high-touch SaaS businesses.
For FeedbackPanda, we already had something similar to AI automation in place when it came to customer support. Intercom smartly suggested articles and allowed us to "autorespond" to common questions. For many customers, this was more than enough, and they never seemed to want to talk to an actual person.
We will definitely see more compatible automation, I'm sure.
There's no doubt that automation and artificial intelligence will play a big role in sales in the future. However, I don't think it will ever replace the human touch completely. There will always be a need for salespeople to build relationships and trust with potential customers.
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This comment was deleted 2 years ago.