The trend from users (businesses and consumers) wanting to buy services – software enabled services, instead of software is accelerating more than ever in my observation. Previously things that most folks would sell as software is now being packaged and sold as a service that solves a problem and is a solution than a packaged piece of software.
In the 90’s and 00’s the solution to a business problem was to develop, deliver and sell software, which was either sold as a license or an annuity. SaaS then came about to provide a change in both the pricing model and the deployment model.
The trend is more pronounced in the consumer portion of the business. Let me give you a few examples and then go into detail of one case study that I discussed with some entrepreneurs Utah.
Take the case of Uber. A decade or two ago, the prevailing model would have been for Uber founders to build the software and then try to sell it to taxi companies and help them service their customers more efficiently. They instead chose to be a “full stack” company and own the consumer experience and recruit drivers to their program.
Another example is Zillow. Instead of providing software to real estate brokerages or individual brokers, they turned the model on its head to go direct to consumers and be a lead generation engine for brokers.
Finally on the enterprise side, HackerRank is a product as an example that a decade ago, would have sold software to companies that helps them manage, deliver and attract software developers with challenges. They prefer to directly attract software developers to their platform and then engage with potential recruiters to help match the top puzzle solvers with companies that are looking to hire them.
Note that in all these cases, the companies are purely software companies, but their business model is predicated not on selling packaged software, but a set of services to end consumers.
I speak to entrepreneurs worldwide, who have heard the phrase “software is eating the world” and then immediately assume that the only way to deliver software and build their business is to sell either a subscription business to the hosted solution or to sell packaged software (yes, there are still folks that think this is the way to go). That is no longer the case and you will find in most instances, investors will prefer full stack companies to software business models in the next decade.
Only hosting your product and providing a SaaS solution does not make your business model different.
That begs the question, how does one go about creating and building a service business instead of a purely software business?
I think the most important phase of your startup journey to figure this out, is when you do your customer development and validation.
During the customer validation phase you will find many potential customers not willing to buy what you sell them (software). That’s usually because they don’t have the problem you articulated.
There are two types of problem articulation strategies. One set of folks articulate the problem they think customers have and another set share examples of the questions potential prospects have.
Let me give you an example of a company I met yesterday.
They are folks that run a theme park who had built software to better manage their park and generate better profits and returns. They were keen to sell software that helps manage a theme park to other owners of theme parks.
When they spoke to potential customers and said they had ERP software to help with theme park management, most potential customers did not care. Their customers did not have a problem that required software. When we got talking, and drilling down to the real problem, it turns out that 20% of a theme parks budget annually was spent on renewing customers.
So, most park owners had a marketing and a renewal problem not a software problem. When they went to the customers with an end to end solution to help streamline renewals and still had software at the back-end to manage the renewals their message seemed more appealing to theme park owners. Suddenly the problem was not software for automating the theme park but a solution to help remove a key headache and a solution to one of their key problems – Renewals.
The startup still wanted to only be a software company so they were not too keen to take on all the hassles of renewal processes, so I suggested they outsource the other aspects of the renewal process to other companies.
Having control of the end to end renewal process, now gives the company the data and analytics to build another stream of revenue to help end customers get discounts on other services they would like and give the theme park owner a cut of that revenue.
That’s the future. Software enabled services will be the primary business model for the next decade or so. Instead of selling it as a software product (either SaaS or otherwise), I encourage entrepreneurs to look at business models in more depth during their customer validation phase.
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