Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

Edit: following downvotes.

There is a seemingly sudden rush of SaaS companies at IPO / major growth levels in the B2B marketplace - how do people track them, or know about them? Is there a news outlet I am missing?

Add to that, the underlying sell for SaaS companies is either ease of implementation (which is a non-differentiator) or it is a genuine new activity (cross enterprise, co-ordinated 3rd party cookie tracking to massively increase campaign targeting / feedback) - so is there a discussion area on what these guys are doing underneath?

Basically - what am I missing?

My original for posterity:

I have never even heard of these two companies - where on earth does one find all these suddenly growing companies?

And frankly, is there a wiki page on what they are really doing under the skin (marketo / eloqua look like glorified dashboards for third party cookie tracking)

(Not that there is anything wrong with a glorified dashboard, I just like to know what people are really doing)

It is often really difficult to hear about some of the enterprise players, unless you happen to work in a department they're targeting, simply because the vastly lower user base (usually orders of magnitudes below B2C or even SMB companies) generates a lot less buzz and mainstream coverage.

But you probably know about a few of them. If you're a developer, something like JIRA is probably roughly equivalent to Marketo or Eloqua in terms of size, market share and visibility. You've almost certainly heard of JIRA, but a good number of marketing professionals haven't. The reverse is true for Eloqua and Marketo.

Both of these tools (Eloqua and Marketo) do quite a bit more than just dashboarding, by the way. They both offer integrated marketing platforms, so they'll be sending e-mails, tracking visitors, running people through automated marketing programs like newsletters or drip onboarding campaigns, and a ton of other stuff.

(Disclosure: I'm an ex-Eloqua employee)

so if I described it as a dashboard-of-patio11's-brain would it be so wrong?

I just get the sneaking feeling that an awful lot of the companies are simply trying to land-grab what half a dozen good open standards would solve to the 80% level

I think by that I mean we are going to see a desire to build your own walled garden, but unless people succeed to the facebook level, there will be standards and consolidation, then a rapid rise of competing open implementations, and bingo, no more market.

"so if I described it as a dashboard-of-patio11's-brain would it be so wrong?"

Frankly - yes, you would be wrong. Not that these companies won't face commoditization like the rest of software, but they aren't simply dashboards - they're tools for managing all aspects of online and offline marketing. That includes email, landing pages, on-site forms, reporting, Salesforce integration, notifications/alerts, lead scoring, et al. There is a lot going on.

Here's a list of SaaS companies sorted by popularity: https://starthq.com/apps/

Popularity is calculated using a combination of the number of likes of the profile page and Alexa reach, so the first few pages aren't particularly useful, but once you get to page 15 or so you'll start seeing major SaaS players in descending order.

Edit: Marketo is on page 32

Thank you.

www.getapp.com. Search any business term (eg, Procurement) and add "Management" + "SaaS" or "Cloud" or "Software" and you will find a wide array of companies that I bet no one here has heard of.

And a lot (including my app) that plenty of people will have heard of. I do agree though, there's a lot of apps in that directory and elsewhere that will end up being well known (or at least acquired) in the next 5-10 years.

The network (cloud) is where you sell your consumer or enterprise application now, not Windows.

The majority of these aren't B2B, really, and of those that are, very few of them are "enterprise" players like Eloqua or Marketo.

Having put the list together myself, I'm certain that 99%+ are B2B. It's true though that there aren't that many "enterprise" players, although Marketo is there.

I just started scraping that list to do some brief analysis / categorising myself - if I come back here with the results later will you object?

Not at all. Let me know via the feedback form (available via the dropdown in the upper right when you sign up) what format you need the data in and I'd be happy to provide it as JSON.

Also, if there's some data missing that you want us to collect, check out our extractor API: https://github.com/starthq/extractor#starthq-extractor-api

Where as in the consumer world you get rewarded for attention, in the SaaS business the most profitable guys try to be quiet to prevent a flurry of competitors.

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