Based on my attempt to build a SAAS analytics product and failing, here are my inputs. - Lower pricing may sound like an entry point. But what ever will allow

Based on my attempt to build a SAAS analytics product and failing, here are my inputs. - Lower pricing may sound like an entry point. But what ever will allow you to build a competing product, will allows others to compete with you. While we were building our Analytics product, we believed using Google BigQuery and other managed services, we could offer a cheaper analytics product, we would pass all the savings of a managed service to the customer. But then Google release FireBase analytics and made Data studio free, AWS released Pinpoint. While currently they might not have the traction of others, they will gain and pretty much make other's current business models un-viable - There is no right answers as to why a company will move from one provider to another. I was always under the impression that "better customer service" will get people to move and more importantly stay. But the real fact is, if you have competition, there are going to be multiple reasons. The tendency of "hackers" to find the single "silver bullet" is harmful, in most cases the whole is more than the sum of its parts. - Most folks who build a startup, don't event thing of branding. Having a known brand is very important in a world where the users almost always self select into SAAS products. I had written a little about it here: https://medium.com/@Ravivyas/abundance-sales-startups-99b42ec7fafe https://medium.com/@Ravivyas/abundance-sales-startups-99b42e... - In most cases basing your startup on a single assumption or theory is a risky prospect. Just being cheaper is not enough, you need to have feature parity, comparable support and a brand. - Most important point, you need to make money, for that you need to chase people willing to spend money, who are not looking to cut corners. Such customers won't stay long. As an extension, having 1-2 big clients on a customer page is more comforting for a prospect rather than seeing 10-20 who they can't relate too.