What are secrets to making money with SaaS?

Question

I am dumbfounded to learn that some of the best products I have come across barely make money, whereas other products that make no sense are rolling in millions of revenue.Can someone explain to me what is so special about Airtable or Flatfile.com that makes them so much money? What is it that developers can be build themselves that these products provide? I am more confused with Flatfile since anyone who know python or basics of javascript can build similar functionality within a week.Therefore, my question is, how to find ideas and build products that make money?

sirspacey · Accepted Answer

Most products that make money had a very long journey to get there, AirTable being a good example.
SaaS is a product for a person in a role that does a job.
Even no code tools like AirTable are mostly sold to internal ops team members and consultants.
If your product enables someone to get a promotion or solve a problem with less friction, you’ve got a shot.
Flatfile is a good example of “search > solve” pipeline products. If you can own top listing for a common challenge for knowledge workers, you can create a brand and then become the tool everyone mentions when solving a problem.
Don’t be too discouraged. Often there are 1,000s of products built to solve a problem but only one becomes “the” product for that problem.
Products are just packages for meeting the needs of a market you can connect with. If you need ideas on products to build, start by offering a service. If people will pay for the service, you’ve got a great chance there’s a market to pay for a product.
Another approach is to crawl web forums for popular products and build a niche solution for a user that complains without response. I’ve been stunned to see that the same startups are launched all the time (like digital notary) and grow very quickly to $10M even though there are well-know products in that space already. Loops is another great example.

legitster · Answer

At a corporate level, you are not paying for the feature - you are paying for the service contract.
Yes, you could throw developers at every little piece of technology you need in a stack. But $800 a month for Airtable is cheap compared to even the cheapest developer.
Even if you are confident you could build something in a weekend and have it work maintenance free for years, that's not a risk most managers would be willing to take.
This is a large reason why corporations largely steer clear of most open source projects. The cost is not the issue - if something breaks and there is no one to take your call, it might cost you millions more dollars than you saved.

mtmail · Answer

Flatfile took more than $50m in venture funding. It's not clear to me if they're profitable or not. With such funding you can hire senior sales people, marketing agency, build prototypes for customers, build integrations, travel to your customers, survive very long enterprise sales cycles, build infrastructure for 10x or 1000x of your current need... all while actively loosing money. No single developer can match that. They've likely outspend their competition on every level.

m0n01d · Answer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224People said the same thing about Dropbox&ldquo;iCaNbUiLdItInAwEeK&rdquo;