Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dizzystar | Hacker News Reader

I think the hole in many SAAS products is the assumption that the end-user has a development team, or that every other SAAS company is going to integrate with their API.

At the end of the day, a small business has much larger fish to fry than trying to figure out how to plug product A into product B, though it is a massive problem for every small business. This isn't solved by hiring programmers, but by downloading data and inserting into macro-enabled Excel sheets. You can hire 5 Excel gurus for the same price as you can a Jr Developer (a typical SMB isn't able to figure out if said dev is worth anything).

The fact is, the end-user really doesn't give a care about "who" but "does it work?" Integrating all the pieces and parts is a very complicated and time-consuming thing for small businesses to deal with.

What comes post-SAAS? A fully integrated suite of products that does what the end-user wants. SMBs would be super stoked to have a product that does inventory, label-printing, CRM, market analysis, sales channels, etc, and pay that to one company. I think that there ought to be an in-between layer. If a some companies could offer a solution that integrate all of the SAAS products needed to run a business, packaged in one place, entire industries would end up toppling. The price differential wouldn't even have to be that high. The company would save the end-user months of research and time-wasting presentations.

I just did a SaaS company serving SMB. We were an all-in-one security play. Well-regarded product.

One of the things that we encountered was a vice between "can you add this filter" and "but I don't need this, only that filter."

In a more general sense, my research suggests that "IT in a box for SMB" is a deadly place to operate. They make sense on many levels, but they don't sell.

I believe that SMBs favor point solutions because they are pain-avoiders. If they've been phished, they want a remedy. Firewall? Content filter" Maybe later...

"Fear" doesn't sell in SMB/Owner-operated businesses as well as it does in Enterprise. Most security selling is "Fear" based.

SMB looks at potential post-event loss vs cost of buying a preventive security solution (Reducing losses). Most security solutions are not priced as insurance premium are determined. The ROI of security solutions is not compelling for SMBs. That is why security solutions targeting SMBs don't succeed.

I see a lot of problems here. You are selling to technophobes, for the most part. They don't care one iota what the difference is between a firewall or content filter is. If you have fraud-prevention, ie, making sure they don't get screwed out of money, you are talking their level.

There shouldn't be an vice between option A and option B. You are selling security, not options. They are paying you money for your expertise, which includes both your programming an your knowledge, which mainly means they have to get things done and don't have the time the learn about this stuff, which is why they are paying you.

That repeats my initial point. The end-user really doesn't care at all about the product, who you integrate with, what you use, etc. They feel like they are paying experts to make these decisions. Asking them is friction, which is nothing but wasting their time.

In my experience most SMB's are obsessed with costs, often to their own detriment.

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