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My company pays for MixMax, Zapier, Slack, Mailchimp, AWS, RingCentral, Gsuite, and more. Our purchase decision-maker (me) evaluates and buys the product, while

by rrggrr 8y ago

My company pays for MixMax, Zapier, Slack, Mailchimp, AWS, RingCentral, Gsuite, and more. Our purchase decision-maker (me) evaluates and buys the product, while our users are along for the ride, reserving their judgment until the merits of the software are felt. As I continue to evaluate new software, and as I watch our SAAS overhead rise, I am looking for software to cut. I'm not a Salesforce shop, but expect this is a serious issue for those purchase decision-makers... paying for many SAAS add-ons in addition to the platform itself. So, I would advise SAAS providers to keep a close an eye on their existing users. We are looking to control our expenses and will leave for higher impact, lower priced alternatives. I recognize this is tough to do when growth and other acquisition/IPO metrics are pressed by your investors. My overwhelming sense: if you're not marketing, enhancing and listening to your existing users, your falloff risk is mounting. Surveys and polls aren't enough. Pay attention to your superusers. Add a client or two to your board. Keep new users close, but your existing users closer.

avitzurel 8y ago
I find "What is the value we are getting?" to be the absolute most crucial question. We were paying a few K$ a month for DataDog. The value we were getting from it was quantified. We evaluated how long it will take to build the features we are using from DD ourselves. It took about a month and we cut them off completely from our stack. If you take the AWS approach, you have to keep providing value and you have to keep getting your users to buy-in. I don't know if there's a very good way to actually communicate with all of your users, emails you get seem to mechanical and artificial. "What can we do better?" type of emails don't really work. On your "manage the saas", did you see https://toriihq.com/ https://toriihq.com/ ?

by rrggrr 8y ago

avitzurel 8y ago

I find "What is the value we are getting?" to be the absolute most crucial question. We were paying a few K$ a month for DataDog. The value we were getting from it was quantified. We evaluated how long it will take to build the features we are using from DD ourselves. It took about a month and we cut them off completely from our stack. If you take the AWS approach, you have to keep providing value and you have to keep getting your users to buy-in. I don't know if there's a very good way to actually communicate with all of your users, emails you get seem to mechanical and artificial. "What can we do better?" type of emails don't really work. On your "manage the saas", did you see https://toriihq.com/ https://toriihq.com/ ?