4 ms·

Ask HN: Should I close SaaS product after 10 years of development?

2 points by po_in_doubts 9y ago

I am a Product Owner (and a founder) of a quite large product that is used by 800+ companies around the world from small to large (largest installation is 1500 users). Here is the context: - It is a very competitive market with a very clear market leader (CRM -> Salesforce) - We've bootstrapped and had organic growth (~20-30% per year till this year) and now close to 100 people in size - This year we'll have 0% growth == stagnation. - We are loosing more and more customers to Salesforce and annual churn rate is above 20% - New sales are slowing down as well - Customers complain about complexity and lack of integrations in general, but technologically the product is quite hard to change, so development speed is not great and we can't iterate fast enough. The questions are: #1 Is it time to sunset the product and focus on something else? #2 Did you experience similar situations with mature product by yourself? What decisions you've made and what results you've got?

teyc 9y ago
Is there anything you can do to get closer to your customers and find out what you should be addressing to make them stickier? Can you find a defensible segment of the market and tweak your positioning/offering? Would it be worthwhile to find out from those who have churned what features they miss now that they are using Salesforce. Perhaps you can port some functionality and get a larger addressable market among Salesforce customers?
- po_in_doubts 9y ago
  1. We have the list of things and it seems it will take 2 years to implement 80% of them 2. Defensible segment is what we are looking for, but to be honest it is quite hard to find. Recently we've transitioned from SMB to Enterprise customers and got some deals, but overall NPS score is low among larger clients.
  - davelnewton 9y ago
    Why is the iteration time so high? Which features mean the most? Can you iterate on those first?
    - po_in_doubts 9y ago
      10 y.o. monolith product is hard to modify. We are building microservices around it, but quite many modifications still should be done in core and it is slow.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
Can you create it self hosted and sell it that way? This way, you compete on 2 spaces. Self hosted and in the cloud.
- po_in_doubts 9y ago
  We do sell self hosted solutions to large customers. It helps sometime, but doesn't change the overall situation.
  - NicoJuicy 9y ago
    What about a lite package with a self hosted option like Sendy/gitlab? How about Marketing? Can you segmentise your product and address a lot of different categories of clients? Eg. A template setup to ease starting? Have you tried upselling some way? I wouldn't drop the ball for a difficult year, it is however a wake up call... In general, you can split up a small team and let them work on a revision of the product with everything you have learned. Not a big team, but a small team with a lot of domain knowledge. But then again, these are all random ideas and your clearly > me ;)