Founders on SaaS Platforms They Use

https://www.marpipe.com/blog/saas-platforms-you-do-and-dont-need-right-now

by bgf419 • 6 years ago

63 30 6 years ago

bgf4197• 6 years ago

We're about to launch a SaaS platform into one of the worst economies of all time. But like every startup, we think we've found the holy grail of tech - something that every business will one day consider crucial to their success. To find out what SaaS platforms companies currently find central to their survival and which tech products are considered 'nice-to-have', we asked over 50 founders to tell us. Collectively, they mentioned more than 70 unique platforms, 6 shades of Google, and several software transitions to free tiers or cheaper alternatives.

sky_rw• 6 years ago

"one of the worse economies of all time". What economy are you referring to? Are you launching a SaaS in Venezuela?

randomsearch2• 6 years ago

UK about to enter worst recession for 300 years.

bgf4197• 6 years ago

US too... which is where I'm from: https://www.bea.gov/news/glance https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

elliekelly• 6 years ago

The point about choosing your bottlenecks carefully is so interesting. I actually love that Zoom automatically sets a time limit on free-tier calls. I might even pay for that feature. The vast majority of meetings don’t need to be a full hour but meetings always seem to go until someone has a hard stop.

Of course that’s the exact opposite of what Zoom is trying to accomplish in cutting us off.

mattbee• 6 years ago

Yes! I always thought it was a weird joke that they give away the feature that makes you organise & focus your meetings, but charge for the one that lets people ramble on forever.

sqs• 6 years ago

If someone makes an open-source, easy-to-use, self-hosted API integration with Zoom that lets me set time limits (with Google Calendar integration to determine length) on Zoom calls and (1) somehow posts a warning ~5min before the end and (2) terminates the call at the end, I would pay for it. (If someone reading this is seriously interested in hacking on this, get in touch with me by tagging me (@sqs) in a GitHub issue or something, and I can lay out more detailed specs.) I don't want to pay more than one person for it, so I'm not sure how to coordinate, but I would pay like $2000 USD.

virvar• 6 years ago

We’ve gone from using four or five different team/project management SaaS tools to using what’s coming with our already purchased office365 for business subscriptions.

I know it’s anecdotal, and while it’s certainly great for us, it’s also quite a lot of money that isn’t entering the market because things like teams and planner are now standard products.

I think the next few decades will be increasingly hard for the SaaS market, because big tech will simply implement the best ideas out there into their current subscriptions.

arkitaip• 6 years ago

It's not a popular opinion on HN but Microsoft really provides superior value with Office 365 [0]. Even though the quality or usability of their products aren't that great, it's good enough for most businesses, many which are too busy getting work done or just surviving rather than evaluating the latest collab/productivity darling that costs another 30-50 USD per employee.

[0] Zoho is the other alternative but even their offerings tends to become expensive once you start using more than a single app.

legitster2• 6 years ago

I'll go further and argue that the quality of Office 365 is actually pretty good, all things considered. A lot of people have bad experience with Office because of all the legacy crap Office is tasked with dealing with, or all the truly bizarre use cases thrown at it.

darrmit• 6 years ago

Microsoft has done a good job playing catch up with Office Online and Teams to a point where now it’s pretty much equal with Google. I still prefer Google just because of the interface subtleties, but I can understand the draw to Office for various reasons as well. Competition is good.

lewisjoe• 6 years ago

I work at Zoho. Would like to recommend checking out Zoho One [0]. Zoho One gives everything a business needs (Mail, Office Suite, Accounting, CRM, Chat and more! It's a huge list.) for 30$/user/month.

Zoho realized this problem of multiple subscriptions a very long time ago. This is what inspired us to work on the depth & breadth of products Zoho offers now.

[0] https://www.zoho.com/one/

scarface74• 6 years ago

Not just from a business perspective. $100 a year for individual use for O365 is a great deal. Six users, 1TB per user for OneDrive and each user can use it across all of their devices - phones, tablets, Macs and PCs.

I don’t see why anyone pays the same amount for just DropBox. Not to mention that Dropbox is basically malware on the Mac.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

The big firms still fail quite often. See Microsoft's multiple attempts to get into mobile.

I expect most of the bigger companies to succeed at converting any desktop product to an online version, and get their customers to adopt it, but beyond that I think you'll see a lot of flops.

fireattack3• 6 years ago

The webpage doesn't render at all on both Chrome and Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/iclK6Dl.png

kelnos• 6 years ago

Given that you're claiming that it doesn't render on two popular browsers, one of which I believe has the most market share of any browser, maybe your first thought should be that there's something wrong with your setup?

thomaslangston• 6 years ago

It doesn't render on Chrome mobile.

fireattack3• 6 years ago

maybe your first thought should be that there's something wrong with your setup

It is, but I tested in new, clean profile and it's the same. No error in Network or Console either.

It looks like to me the font this page uses ("rubik") are just showing as blank despite being a network resource.

I'm no webdev so this is the best I can do.

Edit: I think this font is just broken on Win 7: https://github.com/google/fonts/issues/1137, at least the version hosted on Adobe Fonts which this webpage is using.

ab_testing• 6 years ago

I agree, Chrome on Windows 7, I cannot see a single word in that article or that website. May they should have done some basic testing before using that nice font.

bgf4197• 6 years ago

What exactly does this mean? Is it typical to assume that "a nice font" is going to break on Windows 7?

legitster2• 6 years ago

I've been in the marketing automation space for a while, and it's weird to me for people to describe it as differentiated. There are 50 million different companies in this space, and each one will tell you how beautiful and unique they are, but they are incredibly hard to tell or even care about the differences other than the flavor.

bgf4197• 6 years ago

"50 million different companies" = differentiated

If that many companies can survive in a single space, then that means there's value in granular, incremental differences.

While I agree, most MarTech tries solving the same problem of 'make more money faster'... so does pretty much every SaaS platform or business in general.

As far as feature differences, what would you consider a truly differentiated market? I think there's a spectrum, but most markets are on a continuum more than a discrete number line.

Thoughts?

bgf4197• 6 years ago

Same post on Medium for those of you using Windows 7:

https://medium.com/@brett_64626/what-we-learned-from-50-foun...

Founders on SaaS Platforms They Use

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