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

sidehustlenation.com

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

#91

Post by InvaderFizz »

ako wrote: post #68
smashah wrote: post #64

Most of my revenue comes from companies that basically resell my product with some cherry on top specializations for their local markets. I have managed to develop a mechanism (also just the nature of the product) that charge per end user so it's protected against exploitation. No marketing/landing page required on my end, my clients end up making avg. 6x on top. win win.

Is it saas? How do you enable your customers to specialize your software?

I work for a SaaS that explicitly allows reselling and rebranding.

We change a few variables for what color scheme and theme is applied, what support docs are linked, and what which domain names are used. Other than that, there is very little code difference between what we sell direct and what the resellers present to their clients. Some of those resellers are big names with enterprise reach that we will never have. In the end, it all works just fine for us.

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

#92

Post by kenbolton »

al_borland wrote: post #90
kenbolton wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are careful not to play favorites with customers, whether the relationship is direct or through a reseller. Success for our resellers translates into success for us. Every unit sold matters. Every relationship matters. Critically, every re-order matters. We prefer to smother every relationship with unfailing responsiveness. We never say, "no", but we do say, "not now". The (vanishingly) few customers we have lost,…

>I want to point out that "side hustle" should not be a dirty word. You're right, but it has become very much associated with people trying to "hack" work to generate "passive income", which usually means something that is a borderline scam. Sea kayak instructor/guid, math teacher, and software engineer all sound like perfectly respectable ways to earn money. Most "side hustle" bloggers are pushing things like drop s…

Totally agree! I live in my own bubble and discount everything written on the internet by some (often arbitrary) percentage. (Dons flame-retardant suit.) I double that percentage if Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen have skin in the game in the last five years. (I admit they both had good ideas and implementations, but those feel like ancient history.)

Straight talk, though: software engineering feels like a "hack". I spend a few hours a day making modest adjustments to a SaaS (that adds real value for our customers) and the income feels passive. I spend several hours outside, where the solutions to the software engineering problems reveal themselves.

I take Rich Hickey's "Hammock Driven Development" as a metaphor for, in my case, "Kayak Driven Development".

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

#93

Post by techlatest_net »

Shameless plug here. We are on the other side of this model where we have bunch of applications [0] available in AWS, Azure, GCP cloud marketplace which are very good candidates for white listing / VAR . Feel free to reach out to us (contact in profile) if any one is interested in reselling our products.

[0] AI/ML multi user development environment : http://www.techlatest.net/support/jupyter_python_notebook_su... Web based Ansible environment : http://www.techlatest.net/support/ansible_tower_support/ Metabase, opensource alternative for data visualization : http://www.techlatest.net/support/metabase/ R-Studio for data science & data visualization : http://www.techlatest.net/support/r-studio-support/

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

#94

Post by ethbr0 »

dc-programmer wrote: post #89
ethbr0 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

My bad. My introduction to the topic was through the lens of different use cases

Np! Wasn't intended as a slight. We all come into new things the way we do, rarely via the textbook definition (which typically doesn't even exist when we're first doing it!).

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

#95

Post by braingenious »

This reminds me of those “The Rich Jerk” style get-rich-quick “courses” that were popular in the early ‘00s.

This content is utterly devoid of anything of value and is chock full of highfalutin promises of untold wealth, just listen to my podcast, sign up for my newsletter, click my affiliate links, buy my book, tweet about my blog, upvote me on HN!

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

#97

Post by hinkley »

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…

Did you end up making money off that product line?

I’ve worked at a couple places where the business folk sold our product below cost, and some of our customers built their whole roadmap around us, while we quietly ran out of money.

Without the middleman, you maybe pulled it off.

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

#98

Post by HWR_14 »

rusticpenn wrote: post #73
HWR_14 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes. Sometimes they snipe you. But yes, I agree resellers have value. I'm just saying people who've never tried to sell a product rarely see it.

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

#99

Post by maxerickson »

ethbr0 wrote: post #76
maxerickson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Still, my understanding is that ETL predates the whole "data warehouse" thing.

Like "extract" isn't any more specific than a source and "load" isn't anything more specific than a destination.

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

#100

Post by lupire »

al_borland wrote: post #62

The company I work at has a couple offerings that are just branded versions of software from other companies. It isn't great. When there are bugs, issues, or feature requests, you can't fix them, you can only try and hope that the developers will fix them. But your priorities aren't their priorities. And if you make tweaks on your own, good luck getting vendor support after that. They will just blame all the issues o…

The fundamental problem with white label resellers (different from customs deployment services like WordPress consultants or Microsoft MVPs) is that the only "value add" is marketing lies.
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