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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely not. No company wants to run around maintaining and updating software on multiple computers. Right now, even a small company can use an SSO provider and federate all of their SaaS apps with it and it automatically authorize a new employee.

And how do you propose to write software that works and syncs between Macs, Windows, ios and Android devices?

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I think there's an opportunity here for small businesses who typically don't have a lot of people managing them.

I run a resturaunt. Resturaunt software (POS, scheduling, table reservations) has many saas solutions, but I've personally seen these problems:

- POS requires cellular for some legal reason, but celluar connection is poor inside a mall

- Power goes out, backup services bring cell networks & fiber back online but not in a uniform manner so service is slow and the Saas times out too quickly to be used

- 2 factor auth won't work because cell systems are degraded

And in all these cases, there wasn't a good reason for the software to be fully online. The usage was by 1 or 2 managers and they all shared the same computer located inside the business.

How are you going to do table reservations and accept payments without being online? Yes I know it’s technically possible to accept credit cards offline. But no one does that anymore.

We're not in the US (hence all the power outages), so our recepits are 60% cash, 30% Mobile Money (our country specific accounts attached to your cell phone number), ~5% neighborhood credit for regulars and 10% for tourists using credit cards.

Even though we can accept cards for everyone, transaction fees means no one wants to use it.

Credit cards payments do work during blackouts, but process slowly. It goes from <30 seconds to receipt to 10 minutes+. The bank software just continually retries until it gets all the data it needs.

We take table reservations over the phone, or via WhatsApp. There's no real complexity to it. The data just needs to be with us at one location, the resturaunt, since that's the same place the customer will be coming to. Being online grants us nothing.

I think that there's a large market of business (cardinality, not revenue) that run off a single computer today. Meaning the business owner leverages some fractional accounting, ops, fulfillment support, but do the books, payroll, buy things for the business themselves.

Yes, they connect through a browser to cloud software.

I recognize when you're large enough to have operations, accounting, etc. and see the value of SSO, in those contexts.

Would you like to sell to those companies or provide customer support?

I'm not clear of you're saying to sell the product to the company or sell my company to a larger company.

My preference would likely be to make the quickest buck and move on as I can/will be disrupted by someone who wants to charge less. It's a race to the bottom so try to get out at some local minimum.

Selling one offs to independent low margin businesses wouldn’t be the way to make a quick buck. The sales process is going to be expensive, they aren’t going to be willing to pay a lot and they aren’t going to be harder to support.

This gets to the heart of the real question Cyrus should be asking;

While the market of people who don't want to pay subscriptions might exist, is this the market you want to chase?

Part of building a business is building a customer base. The more "repeat" business you get, the better the business is.

Building your business by targeting people who are cheap (aka Price Sensitive), who are explicitly not going to spend more money with you is not a great business model.

And before thinking about support contracts, or upgrades, remember you are self-selecting people adverse to paying.

Of course cheap people also expect (endless free) support. So just as you're frantically trying to make enough new sales this month to, you know, eat, there's some guy on the phone who bought your software 5 years ago trying to move it to his new laptop...

So yes, of course a market exists. But you might also wonder if it's a market you want...

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