Full SaaS vs. Boutique Consultancy
Suppose you have an industrial market interested in your r&d services but firms want a SaaS product instead of your direct expertise. On the other hand, implementing a full SaaS would be an unaffordable bloodbath, also considering it would almost surely go unused at large. How would you design an effective sales pitch to get the cake and eat it? My current take: an Excel optimiser.
Try the consultancy first and see if there's even enough overlap between client expectations for a SaaS. My former company started as consultancy and after months we learned no client requests was like the other, be it data they needed, in which format or number of revision, it was one custom job after the next. We chose to pivot instead of trying to create a super generic service.
Could you setup a subscription service and have some human elements behind the scenes performing part of the work initially then slowly replace it part by part with a true SaaS.
> implementing a full SaaS would be an unaffordable bloodbath...
Solve this problem -Think Crowdfunding style.
Say, you need 10 clients subscribing @ $10-20K/year.
Will the numbers work for everyone?