SaaS for SaaS Products, Possible?
Hi guys,
It's my first post here, hope to have good discussion :)
I worked in startups for the last 10 years and have seen a lot of services that they all use when they just starting to build a product. And you always facing the same issues. You need to build your blog, subscription, tutorials, support, some pages, do email marketing, etc. Alongside your custom product development.
I thought that our community is a good place to ask/validate an idea.
I want to build a service with the minimum functionality needed to support any aspect of your SaaS product except custom functionally.
What do I mean? I will provide you with:
- Email marketing system from the box
- HR module for hiring/internal team management
- Blog functionality with best practices in SEO ready
- Subscription module with plans/coupons/discounts functions. You just need to attach your stripe account
- CMS for simple page/entity creation
- Tutorials/Academia module to teach your customers and onboard new teammates.
- Simple chat support module
The main question is:
Would you use such a service if there is already MailChimp, Intercom, WordPress, and so on? Would you choose a simpler/cheaper set of modules instead of full functional alternatives?
Drop a comment on what other common feature you develop by yourself that wasn't part of your core product idea?
Do you have any idea how many man hours it would take to even create an MVP for this?
You're basically trying to simultaneously create 10 SaaS products at once.
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You've never created a SaaS before, have you...
I created a few already on my own and 6 SaaS Products from scratch as a part of a team.
Hey, and what's the point of building a one-stop shop?
There are many solid products in the market now, which have been developed for years.
My take is that you should rather go for a specific niche/need
Hi, good point.
There's a few companies that have basically ended up like this, Zoho being a good example. I think typically they start off doing one thing really well though and gradually expand their product offering - it's non-trivial to launch some kind of mega-platform that handles all different facets of the business operations and marketing.
With Squeaky we've built a bunch of stuff ourselves that doesn't relate to our core product, mainly because we're geeks and just like building stuff, but also because it's just nicer and cheaper to have it all 100% within our sphere of influence...as long as it doesn't take more than 1-2 days to design, and 1-2 days to build.
Examples:
There are tradeoffs, and I've seen this first hand working at other companies too. Like up until now it's been actually quicker and more cost effective for us to do this...and fun. But if our business was 2-3 times the size then we'd be better served by dedicated third party tools that were easily extendable and familiar to other team members/new joiners for example.
I appreciate some people would also say 'yeah, but that's also 6-10 days you could have spend on your real business'...sure, but whatever, we like making stuff and it's nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Totally agree with you, I always want to build my own email-sending tool instead of compliance with another service (need to have your address, approved email base, and so on...). The same with CMS and admin panel, I hate all that autogenerating frameworks where you need to spend hours and days just to understand the logic behind it.
Do you think right now it still makes sense to build something like I described? Small/simple features fir API and JS widget. Or is it totally a waste of time?
I think anything so big is probably a bit risky, but each of these individually could be worth pursuing. The problem with it being the one solution to rule them all is that that is only really an exciting value proposition for new businesses (who haven't already got tools in place), and given than 90% of those fail within a few years then your customer base won't be super stable :)
Yeah good point, maybe it's a good idea to build simple one-feature products like payment plans, email tools, support and evolve over time if it would make any sense.
Yeah, there's plenty of money to be made in each of them without having to do everything :) It's much easier to market one thing than everything too!
I guess some would certainly like everything in one place. Personally I like to decouple some services to avoid putting all my beans in one basket. It also sounds like a huge project just to get to an MVP on this for an indie hacker, but absolutely doable :).
How you planned to get started. Launch module per module or create the whole thing at once?
Hi, thank you for your reply. I wanna start with one of the major modules (email, subscriptions, blog, HR) and a few small ones which I would be able to give for free. And then as you said launch one module after another.
Yeah that sounds like a good idea. Narrow scope and subsequent development of modules. Also don't forget talking to customers :).
Had a similar idea. Stripe would be quite a pain as all the bookkeeping will fall back on the founder - better would integrate with a merchant of record. A roadmap could be a commonly needed feature as well, the HR part I would leave out and focus only on the customer-facing side.
Good luck, I would guess it requires quite a massive amount of dev and ui to bring it to a decent level.
Thank you for your feedback, very valuable.
You`re welcome. I guess the business side is also quite hard: there are not so many saas founders alltogether, and only a part of them could use such a service.
This is very similar to the idea I had that eventually became PriceWell (I focused down on payments).
Another similar tool is Outseta, they would be your main competitor if you end up building this.
Thanks for the reply. The PriceWell looks really nice! How long does it take to build it? How many users do you already have? Very interesting.
The MVP was built in a couple of months of evenings and weekends. We have hundreds of free users and the paying customer number is growing. There's definitely a market for this kind of software.
One thing I would say is don't try and build all the modules you mentioned in your post. It will either take many months or you'll end up with poor versions of each of them. I'd focus on one part and determine if there's a market for it. Then ask customers what else they are struggling with.
Sounds good, especially when it will be well UX'ed (I think that some recent separate tools you mentioned are overcomplicated and bad designed). I would add a simple planing module, where funders could track their tasks and milestones. For the planning, a useful thing could be a basic work logger to later equally share equity based on how much each funder contributed to the project.
I know I'm maybe going too far, but as overall, "one tool to do the job" sounds cool.
Thank you for the reply. I had a similar problem with co-founders in the past. So, do you think that some basic tooling for founders should be useful? Mb something like a product management tool like JIRA backlog management?
Yes, something like jira would be fine.
I thought about something like this, but then the issue is that your product will probably never be better than Intercom for support, Mailchimp for email marketing, Wordpress for blogs etc... But for small SaaS I think that can work.
hey, it sounds veery similar to Hubspot.
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Hi, Wix is a site builder for anyone. The main purpose of the Wix is to build a simple website