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Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

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Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#71

Post by somberi »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #18

I have done the exact opposite! Does anyone know if there's any value in a 5+ year old 95% working SaaS web-app with a "very messy" codebase? I personally have two systems (my first attempts at live SaaS systems) that have been just closed but have been working "live" for 5+ years- both made in Laravel with Angular 1.4 front ends, they look good! - but the codebase is "a pile of patches on top of a chaotic prototype"…

So we are clear, I do not profit from this. Happy to take a look and if relevant connect you to a friend who is using something similar at a large scale. IF interested, email is in my profile.

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#72

Post by melony »

You don't even need to white label, the situation in scientific software is so bad that even a a slightly nicer UI + managed hosting (with typical enterprise SaaS level of data security/compliance) will net you many laboratories as customers. Unfortunately it requires significant domain knowledge which poses a challenge. The intersection between frontend UI people and scientific software developers is non-existent (outside of Matlab and Wolfram).

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#73

Post by rusticpenn »

HWR_14 wrote: post #21
Rastonbury wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article? It's not pirating and selling as yours, its reselling. Resellers exist for almost every kind of product or service. The original provider gets more sales, the reseller makes money from taking a cut, the customer gets the product/service. Manufacturers and service providers need distribution, resellers provide this. It's like paying a Chinese company to slap your own logo on a doodad and sell…

The point the are claiming is that resellers don't produce anything or add value. They would almost certainly agree with your Chinese/Amazon analogy and also condemn the resellers doing that. It's a common opinion among those who build stuff for a living and aren't responsible for marketing those things.

The resellers take care of marketing your product in a market where you probably don’t have any presence.

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#74

Post by sputr »

For a startup like ours (great product, traction, everything, but we lack the funds to really get out there, sales wise) we would LOVE to let a reseller use a white label version in markets that we're not present yet (aka. including the US).

If anyone is interested in reselling a psychometrics for HR processes SaaS (with scientifically valid, open source, computer generated assessments, remote monitoring and O*NET sourced profiles) – let me know.

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#75

Post by ghaff »

nprateem wrote: post #59
kenbolton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My business does exactly this. We have a very small sales team, but the firms white-labelling us have tens-to-hundreds of folks in sales and marketing, and sometimes provide a SaaS into which they bundle our white-labelled product. Our ("our"?) sales funnel is in the triple digits, and we have largely migrated away from sales towards fulfilling orders. It is a wonderful place to be!

If I had to choose between owning the sales relationship or the technology I know which I'd choose. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Pretty much any on-prem software vendor is some mix of direct sales, partner sales, and through distribution. And in the case of, say, a product primarily for SMBs, the mix is probably going to tilt pretty heavily to partners. There's a lot of leverage to using partners and many of them will know and be connected to some market a lot better than you do.

There are differences with SaaS but they may not be as big as you think. For example, AWS mostly started as a go online with your credit card sale. Now? They have a big enterprise sales force and lots of partner relationships.

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#76

Post by ethbr0 »

maxerickson wrote: post #54
dc-programmer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was exposed to the idea of reverse ETL recently. The essence of the paradigm is to have a workflow that retrieves data from your SaaS APIs, transforms and enriches it, and then ingests this data into other SaaS providers in order to automate various backend workflows. In a way it’s similar to a gateway in that you are composing different backend targets. Although it might just be a marketing neologism describing mi…

I continue not to understand the "reverse" in that name. Like if you aren't already doing "transform", you probably aren't reversing it.

Parent didn't chose the best starting place to illustrate.

Typically, reverse ETL starts with "all of my data is already in an EDW" and goes to "I want to push it to my various app systems."

Canonical example: pushing system of record information to Salesforce to speed and enrich the sales cycle.

https://hightouch.io/blog/reverse-etl/

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#78

Post by bornfreddy »

BenoitP wrote: post #13
personjerry wrote: post #5

Well, wrong audience here. That's doing all of the hard work (marketing, selling) without any of the fun (engineering).

I was wondering: is there a community online like HN for marketers?

https://www.indiehackers.com/ comes to mind.

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#79

Post by rapind »

onmobile2022 wrote: post #70
stuven wrote: post #66

A startup (series A-B) I worked for was basically a thin wrapper providing physical goods around the core features of a delivery SaaS (series A) - our core features were so entwined with theirs that when they went belly-up, we panicked and bought their source code for an ungodly sum. Then we took over hosting their product for just ourselves, and so had to learn how to run _their_ software too. It was written in a di…

This is a great parable in the making, something something depending on vendor APIs

Not always a bad thing though. I know the Stripe connect API so well at this point I could move payment processing in house based on their data structures and save money on fees.

Re: Reselling Software: Don’t Start a SaaS – White Label Someone Else’s Instead

#80

Post by koonsolo »

nprateem wrote: post #59
kenbolton wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My business does exactly this. We have a very small sales team, but the firms white-labelling us have tens-to-hundreds of folks in sales and marketing, and sometimes provide a SaaS into which they bundle our white-labelled product. Our ("our"?) sales funnel is in the triple digits, and we have largely migrated away from sales towards fulfilling orders. It is a wonderful place to be!

If I had to choose between owning the sales relationship or the technology I know which I'd choose. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I think it comes down to who is the most easy to replace.

If the sellers kind of have a big chunk of the market, and can choose between vendors, you're indeed in a difficult spot.

On the other hand, if the market has multiple sellers, and you offer a unique technology, I wouldn't worry too much.

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