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

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.

Product Hunt has a low code and non-eng community that includes that demographic.

Meta-comment:

The author is relating second-hand information. That’s useful, it’s good to have people who have a skill of curating business advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand advice is to recognize the difference between:

Alice: “I’m making five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”

And Bob: “People like Alice make as much as five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”

In the first case, Alice has direct experience with success. In the second case, the incentives are such that Bob is someone whose experience and expertise is in selecting stories that have verisimilitude, that is, things that sound true.

And what makes something sound true? Quite often, something we want to be true sounds true even if it isn’t, and something we don’t want to be true doesn’t sound true, even if it is.

Bob nearly always sounds more authoritative than Alice, because Bob’s business is sounding authoritative, whereas Alice’s business is being authoritative. Why doesn’t Alice always sound authoritative? Because she speaks the truth whether it appeals to our biases or opposes them, whether we want her truth to be true or not.

Bob, on the other hand, is an authority on what people want to hear. Bob is just as expert in Bob’s business as Alice is in hers. Bob uses metrics and data to write headlines and even choose the most compelling adjectives to use in his posts. Bob sounds authoritative to people lacking expertise in whatever Bob is talking about.

The Bobs of this world can (but don’t always) become “a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a failure’s idea of a success,” because their customers are people early in their lives and careers.

So what to do when a Bob suggests something is true? Well, we shouldn’t dismiss it. But let’s think of it the way we’d think of Bob referring a candidate for a job in our businesses.

We might fast-track them into an interview, but we’d still interview the candidate. And so it must be with business advice. Bob pointing us to an idea is Bob referring an idea to us.

Our job is to take Bob’s referral and still validate the idea by seeking original, authoritative expertise. Bob’s value is suggesting ideas to think about, not teaching us about business.

p.s. I say all of the above as an authority on the subject: I’m a Bob.

> A huge amount of works has gone into them.

"work" has no value on its own. Work is the function; it is the output of that function that may have value. The difficulty is in figuring out who would value it the highest.

For example, an existing customer base is valuable, especially if paying. A working and nice-looking UI, even with a poor backend, is valuable. The combination together might be valuable.

A line of code doesn't have a lot of value, which means that a large company might easily replace a poor backend by throwing some developers at it. Most people buy what they can see, and what they can see in this case is a "look good" front-end that are working "live" for 5+ years.

You should probably contact your largest competitors's partners/alliance/business development teams. Something might develop. Approach it as a partnership and alliance, and something might work out. One more thought, given that this is HN: companies don't actually negotiate with other companies, but: people negotiate with people. That's 90% of sales right there... being human and talking to other humans.

It would be great to hear the trade offs from the perspective of original saas developer. How to make the best of it and not get conned.