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Yeah if anyone has worked at a B2B SaaS startup you would see fast that a large portion of the VC money is just buying other SaaS startup products. We were bas
by makestuff 4y ago
Yeah if anyone has worked at a B2B SaaS startup you would see fast that a large portion of the VC money is just buying other SaaS startup products.
We were basically required to buy all of the products our investors also invested in, and in return they would buy ours. Eventually all of those $10-20/user/month subscriptions add up and really hurt your runway. When I left they were paying for around 30 different subscriptions. Don't get me wrong most of them were useful and cool products, but they definitely were not required.
- icedchai 4y agoI briefly worked at a self-proclaimed newly minted unicorn, and every other day I was getting an invite to a new SaaS product for something. It was incredible.
- seti0Cha 4y agoI joined a startup a while back after being in a bigger company for many years and I was baffled by the number of weird SaaS products in use, often for one small function. At least for a couple of these SaaS companies, I later heard, were run by friends of our former CTO. So maybe this isn't just a VC thing, but a startup culture thing. You buy my marginally useful product, I'll buy yours.
- makestuff 4y agoYeah thinking about it more, I agree with you it is both. We 100% purchased products because the CTO was friends with the other CTO. The other thing was the sales people jumped between startups and would just sell to their same contact list they always have. I wouldn't be surprised they did deals where we bought their product and they bought ours for the same price.
- georgeecollins 4y agoAlso, the last start up I worked for used all the products of other start ups funded by the same VCs. It's like a keiretsu of early adopters.