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Are SaaS businesses really customizing for high paying customers? They may build new features which are then made available to other businesses but I would be s

Are SaaS businesses really customizing for high paying customers? They may build new features which are then made available to other businesses but I would be surprised if there are separate source trees. The other issue is that a "great business" and "scale" are not synonymous. In fact many of the current batch of companies of great scale, like Slack, have spent enormous amounts of money to get there, and still lose money after becoming public. Then you have a company like Atlassian, with a confounding mix of enterprise products that are hard to use: but a fantastic businesses that's been profitable since the very beginning. I do agree with you that the APIs, webhooks, and Zapier integrations solve the problem of customization, although I'd still say it's less customization and more a bevy of options.

zerkten 7y ago
> Are SaaS businesses really customizing for high paying customers? They may build new features which are then made available to other businesses but I would be surprised if there are separate source trees. They are often using the same source tree and instance, but are enabling feature flags for certain customers. This often extends beyond code to data and caching. These don't get maintained and are a pain for support, as well as developers/operations. Over time they are almost as bad as a separate source tree.
dmix 7y ago
That’s why I said they aren’t true SaaS companies. There are thousands you’ve never heard of in every major city with a few super niche customers. And scaling beyond 2-3 real customers does make a very big difference for any legitimately good company.