We are building MixCommerce, A company that will socially be responsible to simplify business operations at an affordable rate. This will be done by bringing most of the use case on a single platform and having plugins and options to customize.
In the US, on average, an average company uses 30+ SaaS tools and ends up spending $1,30,000+ on SaaS solutions. Most of these solutions are individual solutions offered to the company.
One of the major reason why businesses have to spend this much is that each company they offer have its own development, integration, R&D, and most important an expensive marketing team.
Marketing is one of the biggest recurring expenses in any service business unless it’s a wholesome business that has a lot of products in a single umbrella.
This helps as the main company has to advertise for only one of the products and for the rest, they can approach the client and sell. This also means that a new company do not have to have a marketing team, marketing material, marketing team, and most important of all marketing budget just to sell a new product.
Combining SaaS businesses gives the option to rescue cost, and due to a reduction in the marketing cost, we will be able to cust the cost of customer acquisition and eventually offer better products.
1. SaaSHub is the future
SaaSHub is basically combining multiple products, and all the general use cases and letting users customize through plugins and code.
Combining SaaS will be the future of products. These are the reasons why
- Hiring, Firing Different team
- Advertising costs a lot of money
- Office expenses cost money
- Prototyping, Development, and Deployment cost a lot
- R&D costs a lot of money
The general meaning is, Innovation and use cases are required in the initial stage to understand the market. But as the use case is discovered, the products should be offered under a single umbrella to reduce cost and still deliver the same experience.
- Finding the right Software Architecture Sweet Spot costs a lot
- A single subscription of grouped products or everything (just like how Zoho has been leading with ZOHO one, Marketing Plus)
Having said that, product differentiation has been a mistake by ZOHO. Businesses using ZOHO one have been intrigued by marketing plus as marketing tools available in ZOHO one doesn’t offer the same quality.
2. Fundraise isn’t the key
Having hekk lot of money in the bank takes the responsibility, and innovation away from the business.
“Necessity is the mother of invention” but once you have the money is a bank, there will always be a SaaS tool, an expensive engineer and etc to solve it.
In the game of businesses where by definition “business wants to reduce expense and increase profit, cost-cutting, and ingestion to cut the cost should be the key”, this can mostly be approached by being clear with “what we want and limited resources to make it happen”.
Example:
Product We wanted but could not afford: geni.us (Amazon link localization tool)
The product we built: https//tools.stablx.com (currently unused as we are leaving an amazon affiliate)
We basically ended up building a way better localization tool that localized the product without even creating a link(in geni.us we had to create links one by one and link but here, just by placing one JS every amazon link was localized). We built this for less than $120 and used it for years. We also added features like domain tracking, text-to-speech, and backlink tracking which were being sold in the market for quite a big amount. So basically, we didn’t just cut the cost of geni.us but also on tools like SEMRUS which costs $120/M for a single user.
BTW, I got the idea to build this on our own because as a Computer Science Engineer and an Enthusiast, I observe projects, analyze their architecture, and write silly code that works 😀 .
Thanks to my off decision-making to learn MERN stack full stack software development course, I learn it and build quite many useful products and lead the team to build some cool products.
Note to me: I should spend some time on machine learning and data science too. I may end up using them for some projects in the future. I should learn likely TensorFlow with drag and drop so that I can set it up very easily for any project and implement it in any scenario without a big setup.
Conclusion: Money necessarily doesn’t solve the problem but “being clear what you want and how to get it done does”.
3. IPO isn’t the Key
I have seen people judging a company on their shares. I laugh, I laughed, and would likely be laughing watching the game of PR, manipulated numbers, and the VC game of making money from startups. Most of them are in the game of making money not making a strong business and actually helping people and the economy.
Everyone is in business but looks like, Angels and VC end up playing a better game, likely making a profit most of the time and the company struggles because the core team loses control.
IPO doesn’t matter as it changes the business dynamics without leaving control in the company. This basically tells us that we may likely never go for an IPO.
4. The key is “good team, good product, good customers”
A good team, team that understands the use case, builds and tests prototypes to solve the problem, and understands that the feature should be in the plugin, custom solution or product native is the key. Having the trust of customers, and reflecting their values to customers is the key to making the system good.
At the end of the day, no business would like to leave a system that is good, leave a product that is helping their system on every scale.
We just need to understand that
- our products should help them solve the problem
- We should build products based on the problems businesses face not based on industry categorization. Build a plugin, Build a custom solution but make sure the general use case is offered through customization and we are fulfilling the need.
As of 2022, we categorize business into 3 types
- Startups (Having entity is one geolocation)
- Small and medium Businesses (Service, product) (One or More geolocation)
- Enterprise (Multi-National, Multi-State, District, ZONE)
Initially, we are typing to build for startups and small businesses. We should likely be focused on building Small Businesses as they pay. Startups are volatile and often have issues.
There are 2 reasons why startups cannot be our primary customer
- Startups are volatile and less lasting
- They often don’t have enough capital
- 99% of them fail
This brings us to very wrong positions in terms of revenue and sustainability. But, there is one thing that should come to attention.
We should focus on startups, and focus in a way that the moment they think about marketing “mixcommerce” should come into the picture. It should be their go-to “freemium” tool to get started with. Startups are the type of business that collaborate and shared in the community.
The word of mouth should likely be considered one of the assets in return on the investment we make in freemium. The money should be paid by the medium businesses, likely service businesses as they earn, and should be used to move the innovation further.
So, What is Observing, Adapting, and Imagine
Observe, Adapt and Imagining are some of the core principles of innovation.
Observe the industry closely, and browse different types of products. See the usability of the product in the domain and other domains and bring it in the ecosystem.
Example 1:
ZOHO bringing the Trello feature in the marketing plus has been quite interesting. There the many strong reasons why
- It cuts down the cost of having premium tallow
- Centralizes the team of what’s happening
- It has the general marketing template and use case which is often used in the industry
- Everything is in one place, marketing, marketing project, and collaboration. This is exactly what is needed to improve productivity, reduce unproductive mental fatigue and improve the enthusiast towards to real work not switching tabs and tools.
For every business role, there should be only one software to “collaborate, discuss, see project” not 15 different logins and signup that ruins the workflow.
Observation: The observation in the case was that Trello was popular for the project, not very complex to integrate, and thinking about bringing it natively available.
Adaption: Adapting existing modules than building a new one from scratch and testing
Imagine: The use case
Example 2:
AI sentiment analysis is one of the very basic examples machine learning engineers do while machine learning. Bringing the capability to chat support in the existing system with features like [happy, angry, frustrated] in a support system really helps a business. Doing the simple application of the example can save millions of dollars for a business.
Having the option to customize the emotions: (ie: People may use a different word in different industries to describe negativity is one of the most understood and adaptive usecase that helps customers go beyond the general thinking”. The technical behind this might be just inserting the “data” in the database with label negative but the end result, “saving client” is absolutely game changer.
Example 3:
Facebook taking the TikTok features(reels) inside Instagram is another takeover of the power of the audience. I know people were quite happy with it, but it matched the vision of Facebook “increase the profit“.
In the end, these three things bring a very good system to make things father. Some may call this copy and paste but that’s the game of business my friend. The government does not want a monopoly, businesses do not want a monopoly and people don’t want to pay high to a monopoly. Turns out, everyone like distributed power.
Having an ecosystem to observe, adapt and imagine and implement.
