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 <i>also</i> 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 <i>most</i> people doing that will break new ground for the industry. It's <i>ridiculous</i> how much we don't know yet.<p>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.
Never heard of my postmark. You'd think with elasticinbox + someone routing emails for you you'd be done but then who would handle spam? Email is two way, can't wait till I see a Sagas solution to that (probably blind to what's out there.) I mean, there's Pass, DBas, email senders, more analytics than I can count and some great payment processors. Seems the only missing link is a cheap inbound routing/spam fighting system.
I'm interested in managing marketing process so I checked out the current product site. It looks very interesting, I can see marketers finding this useful.<p>Question: Is the photo of your "team" on the front page of your website a stock photo? It seems like a beautiful office, with a cool looking team. But, when I look at your "about" page - it's a different team!<p>No biggie - but I was just curious about the thought-process behind it...
What does everyone think is the hardest thing about building a SaaS business at the moment?<p>I want to make it easier with StartHQ (<a href="https://starthq.com" rel="nofollow">https://starthq.com</a>) and some of the things I've picked up on are: identifying early adopters, managing private beta invite codes & identifying related apps to integrate with.
When I worked at my first SaaS business in 1998 (we were called Application Service Providers at the time) one of the hurdles we had to overcome was potential customers not understanding how the internet worked. One IT manager had difficulty with the idea that if he could get to AOL, he could get to us.<p>How times have changed.
How did you find the "need" for Brightpod? It's niche, so I'm wondering how to find gaping holes in software offerings for small businesses. Everyone talks about how SMEs desperately need software, but how do I find out what these needs are if I'm not in the industry myself?
It is a understandable that things are a lot different in 2013 vs 2007, and not just for SaaS business models.<p>Your blog post would have been much more useful (to me) if you had shared data/numbers that you have access to via analytics tools that you are leveraging into your products.