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SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

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Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#41

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Nice idea - but ...

His argument is "I could buy any SaaS service I liked by simply clicking 'Subscribe to Foo-SaaS for 99 / mth' on my AWS dashboard."

This is true - it would solve his needs immediately and would yes lead to thousands of sales.

For about a week. Then every purchasing dept in the Fortune 500 would collectively spray their coffee over their monitors, and suddenly one of two things would happen a) AWS would offer Enterprises a "turn off that Sht" option (at a cost) or b) every purchasing department would add even more hurdles* before you could pay out.

Yes, it is hard to buy stuff in a corporate - but it is not a bug its a feature.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#42

Post by alangibson »

jariel wrote: post #20

'Putting things on corporate card as a no-no' is definitely a rule they should get over and literally have the CFO or Controller use a card for such purposes, that's entirely feasible and rational.

The companies I'm taking about have 10K+ employees around the globe. The CFO would to nothing but type in the credit card number all day.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#43

Post by Jugurtha »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #37
alangibson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main point is that this bottom up approach doesn't work as well as it could simply because of the difficulty of navigating purchasing processes. I know my team would have bought easily 5x what we did if we didn't have to invest 4 to 6 months in getting a vendor set up for each SaaS we wanted. It just wasn't worth the hassle.

Not to say this would have worked at your company, and not to say it's perfect, but I think the "HACK" of the bottom-up approach for software like JIRA or others is that it is priced in a way where you can get your team at a company using it and showing demonstrable value from using it on a free or very low-cost (AKA your personal credit card) tier. Then, when you go to make it official, you have much more power in t…

Exactly. Then taking it a step further. GP at VC firm makes the round at their "portfolio" companies and see your product on every screen, or hearing about your product from every team they go to, and then wanting to speak with you because clearly someone is doing something right.

Examples: YouTube, GitHub.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#44

Post by dvlx »

Cannot agree with this more.

My team was able to deploy a highly sophisticated technology stack in less than 12 months that could add up to about 50 years of procurement (based on past experience acquiring software for large enterprises). There are 20x more disparate solutions/components, but it all rolls up to a single AWS Bill.

This approach has given us remarkable agility and easily outperform traditional vendor products like Mulesoft, IIB etc. because we are easily able to augment/extend/enhance

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#45

Post by alangibson »

grenoire wrote: post #40

An addition to all the comments in this thread, from a finance point of view, consolidating the tax treatment of multiple resold items would be nightmarish if you want to launch this service internationally. Additionally, the mismatch of billing structures would lead to the hypothetical reseller either keeping margins (big turn-off for onboarding I bet) or keeping wildly volatile short-term liabilities on their balan…

It's not my company, it's every large company I've ever worked for.

I'm not looking for a band aid. I'm looking for a solution that helps the SaaS industry without demanding that the Fortune 500 get their act together, because they ain't changing for our benefit any time soon.

Can you expand on

> Additionally, the mismatch of billing structures would lead to the hypothetical reseller either keeping margins (big turn-off for onboarding I bet) or keeping wildly volatile short-term liabilities on their balance.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#46

Post by alangibson »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #37
alangibson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main point is that this bottom up approach doesn't work as well as it could simply because of the difficulty of navigating purchasing processes. I know my team would have bought easily 5x what we did if we didn't have to invest 4 to 6 months in getting a vendor set up for each SaaS we wanted. It just wasn't worth the hassle.

Not to say this would have worked at your company, and not to say it's perfect, but I think the "HACK" of the bottom-up approach for software like JIRA or others is that it is priced in a way where you can get your team at a company using it and showing demonstrable value from using it on a free or very low-cost (AKA your personal credit card) tier. Then, when you go to make it official, you have much more power in t…

I think maybe I wasnt clear. No one tried to keep us from licensing anything. Pretty much any solution was fine with then assuming it wasn't a security nightmare.

> Just get it done

Getting it done is a process heavy, minimum 4 month process because of purchasing rules. That's the problem I'm calling out.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#47

Post by Jugurtha »

m12k wrote: post #28
vagrantJin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont like talking to sales people but I get where they are coming from. It might also be using the opportunity to do some discovery as to what people are using the platform for and who are those people. But I agree that they should make provisions for people who just want to pay and get to business.

They might also want to massively price segment. Basically they don't want to quote you a price until they've got a feel for where your pain point is. If you're a whale, they want to reserve the right to bleed you dry by not preemptively quoting a lower sticker price way below your budget. But yeah, to me it still just screams "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

>But yeah, to me it still just screams "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".

We're talking about buying product: I have at least to ensure the product does what I need it to do before even considering buying the product, and I can do that on my own. We're not talking about selling airplanes here, where there might be some setting up required for me to test the specs, neither are we talking about software targeted to governmental agencies or the intelligence community. We're talking about products that claim they do X for the knowledge worker, but fail to provide a way for a knowledge worker to test X.

This can be turned to: "If you have to talk to me before I could use or buy the product, something's fishy".

That's Theranos/Nikola hyping the product with claims it can do things but nobody ever saw it do that thing.

I get the price segmentation argument, though there may be better ways to extract more value by providing tailored services to large clients to solve problems only large clients have.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#48

Post by uberswe »

alangibson wrote: post #45
grenoire wrote: post #40

An addition to all the comments in this thread, from a finance point of view, consolidating the tax treatment of multiple resold items would be nightmarish if you want to launch this service internationally. Additionally, the mismatch of billing structures would lead to the hypothetical reseller either keeping margins (big turn-off for onboarding I bet) or keeping wildly volatile short-term liabilities on their balan…

It's not my company, it's every large company I've ever worked for. I'm not looking for a band aid. I'm looking for a solution that helps the SaaS industry without demanding that the Fortune 500 get their act together, because they ain't changing for our benefit any time soon. Can you expand on > Additionally, the mismatch of billing structures would lead to the hypothetical reseller either keeping margins (big turn-…

In Sweden we also have something similar to purchase orders which is common even with B2C and it always bothered me how often it is used compared to the US where credit card was more normal. I think the article brings up a good point, if a startup could figure out the taxes and bookkeeping, set some reasonable margins or costs for the service it could be a really good business.

Edit: Sorry, they would handle the POs so that is liability, I guess some kind of verification or legal framework is also needed here.

Re: SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase

#49

Post by dagw »

grenoire wrote: post #40

An addition to all the comments in this thread, from a finance point of view, consolidating the tax treatment of multiple resold items would be nightmarish if you want to launch this service internationally. Additionally, the mismatch of billing structures would lead to the hypothetical reseller either keeping margins (big turn-off for onboarding I bet) or keeping wildly volatile short-term liabilities on their balan…

It just seems like the author is looking for a band-aid instead of the real problem; a heavily bureaucratic procurement system in their company.

Sure, but as someone who works at that sort of company, we happily give lots of real money to companies that solve that problem for us. As recently as a few month ago I wanted to spend 1-3 thousand dollars pr year on a SaaS product. The problem internally was never exactly how many thousands I was spending, but what the payment process looked like. And the sole reason I didn't give that money to the SaaS company was because they couldn't work with our procurement process. We're now investigating a much more expensive solution from a much bigger company.

I'm sure the SaaS company turning down our money was being rational and figure the cost of taking our money was higher than the profit they'd make from us, but there still seems to be money left on the table for someone to scoop up.

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