Shopify as a Model: The "Meta" Trend for SaaS Platforms

What do many successful technology products have in common? They provide businesses with the tools to start, run, and grow their digital storefronts. Companies like Stripe and Shopify have accelerated their own rise, growing 10x over the last 3 years, by helping organizations do the same. It's time for new products to emerge that apply this "meta-ness" to the next generation of SaaS (Software as a Service) platform builders.

In RunWithIt podcast #70, George Deglin of OneSignal offers his analysis that SaaS companies spend ~30%-40% of critical developer time on common fundamental functionalities. Even after launch, the need for maintenance, integrations, and additional capability can suck away over 25% of the development effort. That's time and brainpower that could be spent enhancing complex use-case requirements.

"There are hard problems to work on, but it's not these." - George Deglin

These fundamental back-office applications include necessities such as:

• user account management;
• usage-based billing tools;
• billing systems;
• free trials management;
• performance monitoring;
• and a wide range of integrations with support tools, accounting systems, sales and marketing software, etc.

None of the functions listed above are genuine differentiators for a given SaaS solution, yet each is essential to a solution's success. If even a single function is missing or inadequate - the SaaS platform will struggle to grow. Unfortunately, user experience anecdotes across many companies suggest people are still getting these fundamentals wrong.

Instead, opportunities exist for innovative entrepreneurs to create a new suite of B2B solutions, targeted to reduce the mundane development grunt-work for other SaaS business founders. Not all of the new products need to be world-beating, multi-million-dollar efforts. It's entirely feasible that smaller yet essential tools could be solo-founder-scaled, or even "side-gig" projects.

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One of the thorniest challenges for this approach, however, is the inevitable long ramp-up required to get going. A solution as described above won't provide value to already-established SaaS products in the market, unless the switching costs can be made attractive. Rather, the new suite of tools would appeal most to brand new products that haven't even been built yet. Joining forces with VC groups or incubators, then, could be an excellent source of early adopters, offering use-case definition and validation.

George Deglin predicts early-stage entrepreneurs would be willing to pay up to 3% of their revenue to reduce their development burden, with additional opportunities for monetization gained through the payment system itself. Adding data insights could also be a source for revenue, as business clients would value analyses and comparable data and benchmarks against other users.

This approach isn't going to win over many pundits in the mainstream media. But if "rich-and-famous" could be satisfactorily replaced by "rich-and-known-in-my-field", then imaginative indie hackers willing to "get meta" could be responsible for jump-starting the next phase of SaaS platform maturity.