Selling SaaS in Germany
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Selling SaaS in Germany
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Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#2[deleted]
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#3In the UK as a startup we found buying Silicon Valley SaaS tools to be a bit different sometimes in similar ways.
Europe, even the UK, prices tech startup significantly lower than the US (a colleague once said that in the US you get funding to turn an idea into execution, in Europe you get funding to turn your execution into money), plus we were tech/retail, so our valuation was just never the same as a pure-tech (or SaaS) business.
Because of this, we had numerous SaaS pricing discussions where the sales rep didn't seem to understand that their pricing was just a non-starter for us. "Why wouldn't you pay $15k a month to save half an engineer's worth of work?"... because our engineers don't cost that much, and we don't have that money.
So much of SaaS pricing is predicated on customers being B2B, pure-tech, VC-funded, plenty of funding, with exceptionally high engineering costs. Essentially: cost is not a concern. Most of the world is not going to pay another $30/m subscription for every employee.
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#4In the UK as a startup we found buying Silicon Valley SaaS tools to be a bit different sometimes in similar ways. Europe, even the UK, prices tech startup significantly lower than the US (a colleague once said that in the US you get funding to turn an idea into execution, in Europe you get funding to turn your execution into money), plus we were tech/retail, so our valuation was just never the same as a pure-tech (or…
I am at a pretty good (for european standards) startup, entirely bootstrapped with no investor money. We use virtually 0 SaaS ourselves with the exception of tailscale. The pay $40/user/month pricing seems insane for what most of these things do and they are almost always trivial to selfhost. Of course if you have millions of investor money to waste, it’s a drop in the bucket.
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#5In the UK as a startup we found buying Silicon Valley SaaS tools to be a bit different sometimes in similar ways. Europe, even the UK, prices tech startup significantly lower than the US (a colleague once said that in the US you get funding to turn an idea into execution, in Europe you get funding to turn your execution into money), plus we were tech/retail, so our valuation was just never the same as a pure-tech (or…
I am at a pretty good (for european standards) startup, entirely bootstrapped with no investor money. We use virtually 0 SaaS ourselves with the exception of tailscale. The pay $40/user/month pricing seems insane for what most of these things do and they are almost always trivial to selfhost. Of course if you have millions of investor money to waste, it’s a drop in the bucket.
Same. And even for Tailscale we use a European alternative (Xplicittrust), because this aggressive growth of VC backed American tech is a real turn-off. We have seen where that leads often enough by now.
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#6I feel this article is saying people from UK/US/etc. want to maximize upside, and people from DACH (Germany etc.) want to minimize downside.
I was a bit shocked when I talked to an Austrian colleague once and they told me they wanted to get into investing, but losing any money at any time was completely unacceptable. They had looked at investing in S&P 500 ETFs etc., but felt they must have misunderstood something, as they didn't understand why anyone would invest in anything that might go down, even temporarily.
So the thesis of the article definitely feels plausible to me.
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#7I feel this article is saying people from UK/US/etc. want to maximize upside, and people from DACH (Germany etc.) want to minimize downside. I was a bit shocked when I talked to an Austrian colleague once and they told me they wanted to get into investing, but losing any money at any time was completely unacceptable. They had looked at investing in S&P 500 ETFs etc., but felt they must have misunderstood something, a…
I'm glad this one interaction helped you understand an entire people. That's efficient.
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am at a pretty good (for european standards) startup, entirely bootstrapped with no investor money. We use virtually 0 SaaS ourselves with the exception of tailscale. The pay $40/user/month pricing seems insane for what most of these things do and they are almost always trivial to selfhost. Of course if you have millions of investor money to waste, it’s a drop in the bucket.
Same. And even for Tailscale we use a European alternative (Xplicittrust), because this aggressive growth of VC backed American tech is a real turn-off. We have seen where that leads often enough by now.
A bit turned off by their 'contact us for pricing' line.
Why not show your pricing like any other provider does?
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#9How about the payments, what is the easiest way from corporate customer perspective in DACH? Let's say for smaller subscriptions, <1000€/month?
Re: Selling SaaS in Germany
#10I very much agree with the fact that IT departments have a massive influence during the sale process. Though, based on my experience, things are slightly softening. We entered the DACH market in 2023 with a cloud based CRM for the care sector. Before that, it was pretty much inconceivable in the care sector to use anything that wasn’t installed on-promises and fully isolated from the internet. Nevertheless, companies are quickly realizing that this is not scalable anymore. There is an urgency for modernizing work tools which is simply not possible with the limitations of the on-promises software era. Additionally, things like C5 seem to give a lot of confidence to IT departments for speeding up the sales process.