I often ask myself "If I got a do-over on my entrepreneurial career, what would I have hoped to have known when starting and so not had to learn the hard way?" Today's installment, on the business model behind SaaS companies. https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas … Some thoughts:
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Speaking of the simple model working: one of the reasons I'm so jazzed to write about SaaS at Stripe (and we will be writing a lot more in the future) is that there is a wide body of practices which are in the uncomfortable position of being known by everyone and done by few.
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I sometimes got asked during my consulting career what the secret black magic was. The secret black magic is 98% boring execution on the same set of things that everyone else knows to do and few successfully organize their firms into doing consistently.
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"What's the other 2%?" I'll tell you if I ever figured it out. My one original thought, in ~10 years in the business, was altering the first-run experience and flow of the free trial in response to exact marketing channel a user came in through. (Please steal that. It worked.)
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(Conceptually this is "If they Google [$PRODUCT api docs] and end up on your API docs and then sign up for the free trial, and your free trial comes in Developer, Finance Professional, and Operations Professional flavors, you don't have to ask them which trial they want.")
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Since the various sub-disciplines in a SaaS company get arbitrarily deep, you get interesting returns to specialization. Effectively none of them are taught to any useful degree in school. This causes networks to be very, very powerful in SaaS.
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Rather little of the technology of running SaaS businesses is written down. (Working on it!) A huge portion is bringing together a team of people who've done similar things before. This is one reason why Silicon Valley tends to race ahead with regards to funded SaaS.
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I live in Tokyo and love it here, but you could scour Tokyo high-and-low and probably not find someone who would give the 47th best SaaS lifecycle email writer in SF a run for their money. (That is a reasonable professional speciality to have given how useful it is.)
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And since the rate of skill growth is generally proportionate to the rate that the company hits new challenges at, the best thing you can do for yourself in SaaS is to work at a team where the functions supporting you work reasonably well. (That might be true of most work?)
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