5 ms·

It is absolutely true that everything about 2013 is superior to 2007 for SaaS businesses, with the debatable exception of the amount of competition in any niche

by patio11 14y ago

It is absolutely true that everything about 2013 is superior to 2007 for SaaS businesses, with the debatable exception of the amount of competition in any niche/vertical. It is also true that the best time to start a SaaS business for the 2013 market was 2007 (or as earlier as you can push it). You get a head start on the learning curve, which is formidable, even with lots of people generously sharing what they know about customer acquisition, technical topics, etc etc etc. It is virtually impossible to read your way to scalable customer acquisition (or any other very worthwhile business goal). Past the high-basic/low-intermediate level you have to put things into practice in your own business and see how they work out. In 2007, virtually anybody doing that was breaking new ground for the industry. In 2013, only most people doing that will break new ground for the industry. It's ridiculous how much we don't know yet. 2018 is going to be superior to 2013 in pretty much every way, but don't wait until 2018 to start, if you're on the fence about it.

karterk 14y ago
Totally off-topic, but welcome back!
arkitaip 14y ago
SaaS pioneers date back to the 1960s so we have decades of knowledge that's floating around. More recently, during the 1990s, we had Application Service Provider that tackled the same issues. Imagine being IBM during those very early years trying to sell the idea of remote computing - it must have been an utterly alien concept to most organizations. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service
- VLM 14y ago
  I worked at a IBM Mainframe shop in the early 90s. It wasn't so alien because back then there was a semi-infinite smooth graduation from completely internal to completely outsourced and that demarc line seemed in continuous flux with seemingly every customer. Also moving from different levels of inside/outside was pretty smooth and basically user transparent. We owned our own hardware (some was leased) and more or less supported ourselves but also had an onsite IBM CE more or less full time. We also outsourced our disaster recovery to two different far away places. So it wasn't utterly alien at all, we just kinda smoothly took over or gave away responsibilities. Also decisions were made by tech people with tech people, more or less, rather than businessmen. So there was not much of a knowledge disparity. The businessmen set a budget and a goal, but the techies decided the "right place" to store bits. Conceptually now you can move from local mail servers to gmail and back as you please, but its not nearly as end-user transparent or as easy and fast as SAAS was back in the day. Maybe someday your email server will be a vmware or whatever image and you'll decide to run it locally on your own hardware or upload it to a private server or a cloud and it'll just transparently "work" but we've got a long way to go before we (in general) reach the level of what mainframes did decades ago. Another good model for how SAAS worked in the old days was telecom after ma bell broke up and before everything re-merged back into a couple big players. Not unusual for a private line ckt to flow thru 4 or 5 companies all with different demarc points and responsibilities. Things were a little more standardized in the mainframe world 20 years ago than in general now.
logicman 14y ago
Well said!

by patio11 14y ago

karterk 14y ago

Totally off-topic, but welcome back!

arkitaip 14y ago

SaaS pioneers date back to the 1960s so we have decades of knowledge that's floating around. More recently, during the 1990s, we had Application Service Provider that tackled the same issues. Imagine being IBM during those very early years trying to sell the idea of remote computing - it must have been an utterly alien concept to most organizations. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service

VLM 14y ago
I worked at a IBM Mainframe shop in the early 90s. It wasn't so alien because back then there was a semi-infinite smooth graduation from completely internal to completely outsourced and that demarc line seemed in continuous flux with seemingly every customer. Also moving from different levels of inside/outside was pretty smooth and basically user transparent. We owned our own hardware (some was leased) and more or less supported ourselves but also had an onsite IBM CE more or less full time. We also outsourced our disaster recovery to two different far away places. So it wasn't utterly alien at all, we just kinda smoothly took over or gave away responsibilities. Also decisions were made by tech people with tech people, more or less, rather than businessmen. So there was not much of a knowledge disparity. The businessmen set a budget and a goal, but the techies decided the "right place" to store bits. Conceptually now you can move from local mail servers to gmail and back as you please, but its not nearly as end-user transparent or as easy and fast as SAAS was back in the day. Maybe someday your email server will be a vmware or whatever image and you'll decide to run it locally on your own hardware or upload it to a private server or a cloud and it'll just transparently "work" but we've got a long way to go before we (in general) reach the level of what mainframes did decades ago. Another good model for how SAAS worked in the old days was telecom after ma bell broke up and before everything re-merged back into a couple big players. Not unusual for a private line ckt to flow thru 4 or 5 companies all with different demarc points and responsibilities. Things were a little more standardized in the mainframe world 20 years ago than in general now.

logicman 14y ago

Well said!