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> Is this an arbitrage opportunity? What's the best way to harness this concentration of energy? Here is a profitable idea. Make a group decision and choose a

> Is this an arbitrage opportunity? What's the best way to harness this concentration of energy? Here is a profitable idea. Make a group decision and choose a target profitable SaaS company or startup of your choice, replicate it with AI and race the target SaaS company to near zero in pricing and sell your services as the cheapest offering to SMEs and enterprises (assuming you guys have experience in this area) Keep it running or sell it to another business and the collective reaps the profits once the target SaaS company is dead or is unable to compete. Repeat for all or any companies or startups that you wish should not exist or that laid you off in the past

jdlshore 2y ago
You’re making the mistake of believing that people choose B2B SaaS purely on the basis of price and features. While those are a component, reputation, marketing, and an effective sales force are far more important.
- colesantiago 2y ago
  And so do the collective people who worked on the competing SaaS have all of those skills as well to use to their advantage. Just say you've worked at Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc, 300 years of collective experience. S4 Capital famously won contracts away from WPP even though WPP had a long standing reputation and marketing prowess.
- AznHisoka 2y ago
  This. It would take a lot for me to switch over to a cheaper provider especially if it was something mission critical. It’s way too risky. On the other hand, if it wasn’t mission critical (let’s say replacing my todo list tracker), then I wouldn’t even consider replacing it because it’s not critical, and it’s not expensive. Why should I waste my time replacing it with something a bit cheaper? So it’s a catch 22
  - colesantiago 2y ago
    Until your existing provider jacks up prices 20x because they know you won't move.
conductr 2y ago
A lot of naysayers on this idea but there’s plenty of low hanging fruit that companies would love to find a cheaper option for. It would of course take time to gain traction without a sales force but also this very community of people that would band together could effectively evangelize a better solution with just their existing network. Tech people are often the early adopters and word spread via Twitter, etc. I’m in non-tech industries in finance/accounting and during budget conversations a few things over the past few years consistently pop up as this costs too damn much; smartsheets, zoom, slack, etc. I actually implement a specific Oracle product that costs most companies 6 figures a year that could easily be self service SAAS product with a much better solution. Financial analysts skew mildly technical and could implement it themselves and be targeted fairly easily. Competition exists but they always bloat the product to charge almost as much or more than Oracle does. But end users only care about a few small features and I think some one could execute those much better than what exists on the market. All competitors require an enterprise software sales process to even see/demo their software. If the analysts could login, connect to their data, and set some custom configurations (possibly llm assisted?), and worry about monetizing the relationship until the value prop has been realized- then I think this would spread on its own, people in the industry talk, change jobs frequently and take their tooling preferences with them. Best of all, this group of people usually report to a cfo and can offer their department a significant cost savings by doing this, saving the company money is literally their job already. That’s my business idea without giving it away entirely lol. Comment here if you’re actually interested in this, I would love to join a group like this working on something as a group. I can code but never done so professionally or as part of a team.
- em-bee 2y ago
  this does sound interesting, but the challenge is still funding the start. bootstrapping is great (and i prefer it over having investors) but i still need to feed my kids. so the question is, how do we get to ramen-profitability (make enough so we can feed ourselves, even if it's only ramen noodles)
  - conductr 2y ago
    I get it but don’t have a direct solution for that, it’s a process and includes many unknowns and has no guarantees but isn’t the premise here to use our unproductive time while unemployed to create something that hopefully is worth something one day? It’s odd to me that while unemployed people are all individually working on side projects, learning the latest stacks, etc and do it all as throwaway code that will never see the light of day-and that’s seen as acceptable, as is contributing to open source, etc. But doing those same activities as a cooperative and paid in equity is where people draw a line. There’s definitely a lot of details to work out if this were to take shape. How much equity do people earn, what happens when they get a job and their availability declines, etc. But it wouldn’t take much effort to think through those kinds of things and make something reasonable/fair.

jdlshore 2y ago

You’re making the mistake of believing that people choose B2B SaaS purely on the basis of price and features. While those are a component, reputation, marketing, and an effective sales force are far more important.

colesantiago 2y ago
And so do the collective people who worked on the competing SaaS have all of those skills as well to use to their advantage. Just say you've worked at Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc, 300 years of collective experience. S4 Capital famously won contracts away from WPP even though WPP had a long standing reputation and marketing prowess.
AznHisoka 2y ago
This. It would take a lot for me to switch over to a cheaper provider especially if it was something mission critical. It’s way too risky. On the other hand, if it wasn’t mission critical (let’s say replacing my todo list tracker), then I wouldn’t even consider replacing it because it’s not critical, and it’s not expensive. Why should I waste my time replacing it with something a bit cheaper? So it’s a catch 22
- colesantiago 2y ago
  Until your existing provider jacks up prices 20x because they know you won't move.

conductr 2y ago

A lot of naysayers on this idea but there’s plenty of low hanging fruit that companies would love to find a cheaper option for. It would of course take time to gain traction without a sales force but also this very community of people that would band together could effectively evangelize a better solution with just their existing network. Tech people are often the early adopters and word spread via Twitter, etc. I’m in non-tech industries in finance/accounting and during budget conversations a few things over the past few years consistently pop up as this costs too damn much; smartsheets, zoom, slack, etc. I actually implement a specific Oracle product that costs most companies 6 figures a year that could easily be self service SAAS product with a much better solution. Financial analysts skew mildly technical and could implement it themselves and be targeted fairly easily. Competition exists but they always bloat the product to charge almost as much or more than Oracle does. But end users only care about a few small features and I think some one could execute those much better than what exists on the market. All competitors require an enterprise software sales process to even see/demo their software. If the analysts could login, connect to their data, and set some custom configurations (possibly llm assisted?), and worry about monetizing the relationship until the value prop has been realized- then I think this would spread on its own, people in the industry talk, change jobs frequently and take their tooling preferences with them. Best of all, this group of people usually report to a cfo and can offer their department a significant cost savings by doing this, saving the company money is literally their job already. That’s my business idea without giving it away entirely lol. Comment here if you’re actually interested in this, I would love to join a group like this working on something as a group. I can code but never done so professionally or as part of a team.

em-bee 2y ago
this does sound interesting, but the challenge is still funding the start. bootstrapping is great (and i prefer it over having investors) but i still need to feed my kids. so the question is, how do we get to ramen-profitability (make enough so we can feed ourselves, even if it's only ramen noodles)
- conductr 2y ago
  I get it but don’t have a direct solution for that, it’s a process and includes many unknowns and has no guarantees but isn’t the premise here to use our unproductive time while unemployed to create something that hopefully is worth something one day? It’s odd to me that while unemployed people are all individually working on side projects, learning the latest stacks, etc and do it all as throwaway code that will never see the light of day-and that’s seen as acceptable, as is contributing to open source, etc. But doing those same activities as a cooperative and paid in equity is where people draw a line. There’s definitely a lot of details to work out if this were to take shape. How much equity do people earn, what happens when they get a job and their availability declines, etc. But it wouldn’t take much effort to think through those kinds of things and make something reasonable/fair.