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6 Comments

Has anyone come by a service to rent a SaaS business?

I've kicked tires on flippa.com in the past (a site to buy businesses outright), but I don't think I've seen one where you can just rent it and take control for a monthly price. I feel like I would totally do that if the price wasn't too high...

Am I missing something? Would anyone else do that, or is the difficulty of controlling the renter and limiting what they can do too high a cost? Other problems I haven't seen yet with something like this?

  1. 2

    Renting happens only when the rented item is use-able or re-rentable to another person after the previous customer has returned it.

    Which means damage on the rented item is minimum.

    Does this happens with you idea ?

    How can a orginal owner be sure about this in regards to your concept ?

  2. 1

    This is pretty common in agriculture. You have a farm and don’t want to bother with planting and harvesting, so you lease to another party who assumes the risks and pay you a guaranteed amount of money regardless the crop outcome. In my opinion, it could work if there is an intermediary to take care of agreements and make sure everything is legit and transparent. The challenge here is business products are not so simple as a commodity, and you generate equity value overtime. Intriguing.

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    Sitting both sides of the table, I struggle to see a situation where this works.

    If I built the company and its profitable or has potential, I will maintain it, not rent it.
    If someone built the company and its failing, I most likely would not want to rent it.

    In the uncertain times between idea and validation, the person most likely to push the company to success is the one who fully understands it - eg. the founders not an opportunistic renter.

    When talking about "take control for a monthly price" the only viable solution I see is to not take control. Just take a stake. Buy dividend paying shares if after stability or pure equity if in for the long run.

    "difficulty of controlling the renter and limiting what they can do too" adds more confusion, that sounds more like a basic reseller or affiliate program where the "renter" has no control or ownership. If that's what you mean then there is no business involvement, the renter is a simple customer not renting anything.

  4. 1

    I won't rent out my SaaS for it to crashed and brought back

  5. 1

    How would you expect this to work?
    Who controls what?
    Is this an open rent forever monthly or like a try before you buy? Or a fixed term? What are the base conditions to make it balanced and worth it to both sides?...

    1. 1

      I reckon he's talking about something similar to Shopify (https://www.shopify.com/pricing) - you pay a monthly fee and give them a small transaction fee per every purchase.

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