You can’t build a SaaS company in 2018 without significant funding

Upvoted because it&#x27;s an interesting topic, but the statement in the title is straight-up inaccurate and reflects the author&#x27;s biases regarding what meets the criteria for &quot;SaaS company.&quot;<p>In the blog post itself he wrote, &quot;As of 2018, I believe it is now impossible to start and scale a SaaS business without significant capital. [...] Bootstrapping SaaS to sustainable revenues and profitability is so hard in 2018 because of the time it takes to grow organically. [...] That said, it is still possible to gradually build up a profitable small software business in a niche area that can grow over time.&quot;<p>Yeah, that last example? No reason why a niche software business wouldn&#x27;t be considered a SaaS company.<p>Really I&#x27;m annoyed by the phrasing &#x2F; terminology here. He should have specified that he&#x27;s talking about a large SaaS company... but at that point it&#x27;s banal to say that you can&#x27;t do it without raising capital.

I started Searchify in 2012 bootstrapped (Search as a service). My goal is not to &quot;beat&quot; my better-funded competitors, but to simply outlast them. So far, one down, a few more to go.

&quot;Regardless of whether you actually need all the features on offer, it comes down to how many features a vendor has.&quot;<p>I have to disagree with that. Essentially all of recent economic history says there are <i>at least</i> three ways to compete at any given time for all services and products: superior price, superior product, superior marketing&#x2F;sales&#x2F;brand, and various combinations of those.<p>For my own reference, I aggressively shop on price + quality. I&#x27;ll take 85% equal product quality with a required baseline of features at a lower price point. Generally speaking, there will never be a time that you can&#x27;t compete by lowering price, while maintaining a certain minimum ~85% good enough quality level.

I had a bit of a knee jerk cringe reaction to that. I think I understand why after thinking about it.<p>He’s mostly right. Mostly. Very few SaaS products are designed to be exciting products. They solve problems, maybe even major business problems, but if we’re being honest here they rarely make a meaningful impact in someone’s life. You use them and move on. Most people who have to use these products are paid to endure them until the day is over and they can go home and go back to what they really care about.<p>So yeah, the company with the resources necessary to drop it’s prices and aggressively sell something that no one really cares about will win. It’s a race to the bottom. If that’s upsetting, too bad.<p>Unless...<p>Unless you build something that individuals, not companies, care about.<p>I think that’s why Slack is doing so well. Most of the add-ons for it have no real legitimate business need. Your company doesn’t need GIPHY, or party parrot emojis. People sure love that sort of thing though. It makes work a little more fun. I think they’re created value in a way that is very hard for competitors to replicate.

Lets put this out there. Building any successful business is difficult. The trick with SaaS is overcoming the inflection point where your business transitions from bootstrapping to growing as a viable business. The juxtaposition of supporting early adopters against growing the user-base is always a pitfall but not impossible to overcome with a bit of patience and planning (or luck).

We are currently bootstrapping formlets.com. in a very competitive Form building market. When you use remote talent you can bring your costs down to compete with players with big pockets.

If you&#x27;re building a unicorn yes you will need serious capital but otherwise not necessarily. It is still possible in 2018 to bootstrap a SAAS startup.

&gt; Sales teams are expensive,<p>Then don&#x27;t have one. Find something that people &#x2F; businesses around you need, build it, and then let others come to it too. Classic way to a slow burning successful small business. An entire sales team? To start with? Nah.

This is too generic, and hard to apply to one market space or industry. Beware of broad brushes like this.