Should my SaaS have been a service business?
My product PriceWell helps businesses integrate Stripe Billing into their website/web app with no code. We are seeing some traction and have a handful of paying customers who are mostly 1-2 person businesses. Plus hundreds of free tier customers where we take a transaction fee.
We have had multiple enquiries from larger, well-funded companies asking us to run their billing operations for them. So they can concentrate on building the product. They’d need custom development so wouldn’t fit into our standard SaaS offering.
Now I’m wondering whether the whole business should have been an agency instead.
Does anyone have experience with this? Any thoughts welcome.
Honestly, you may be surprised at how many major companies spend half of their time working on custom code for another partner. It seems like you have some traction with the SaaS model for payments, you may just need to spend some time building an API to allow other companies to use your system. I've just spent 3-years doing running intergrations for a company that was integrated to lots of major players, what I would suggest is you look at the core functionality these companies are asking for and then build an API around those methods.
I suspect in the long run it may be worth doing some custom development to get going to the big leagues as a billing system provider. Billing is something a lot of companies don't want to build or maintain. It was actually originally one of the core things I wanted to have in getparthenon.com to target large clients, it's just I think I need to focus on being a SaaS boilerplate for a while and then start targeting the big boys in a year or so. Just now I only deal with basic subscriptions, but I've seen so many companies be in a world of pain and be willing to spend lots of money to deal with billing that I know at some point it'll be a major feature for me. So I really think if you already have people asking, you could be on to a serious money source and it's worth pivoting to meet demand.
Thank you that's very helpful. Our initial target market was non-technical founders. Bigger companies have dev departments so they are technical, an API or easy integration could be the way to go.
The best thing to do is to test and see if there is a market for that, and if you are interested in running that type of business.
If you are getting requests for a setup service maybe there is opportunity there to upsell some of your clients. Talk with them to understand what they are looking for, what are they expectations, princing is a very sensitive topic so I would guess there is a good chance you could charge a premium for a consulting service.
Thanks, that's very helpful.