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B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

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Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#61

Post by start123 »

cosmodisk wrote: post #52
start123 wrote: post #48

I would add Bitly in Marketing as well. They have more than $100 million revenue per year. Link shortening has got a bad rap but there is plenty of demand for branded links. I have spent last few months talking to unsatisfied customers of Bitly and following this space and I see a general disappointment with UX, lack of flexibility and high costs associated with the platform. My service https://blanq.io has tried to…

Have you got any traction with your project? What's your elevator pitch to differentiate?

Yes. As of now have a few paying customers and it covers the expenses of my servers.

I will need to double down on marketing efforts in coming days. But I do see there is a need.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#62

Post by yowlingcat »

I was looking through the Shopify marketplace a while back and I had the thought that channel partnerships/marketing is probably an amazing way to bootstrap a SaaS. Glad to see someone else had the same idea and did the due diligence to collect a good chunk of these. I'm bootstrapping something consumer facing now, but I've of course thought about "pivoting to B2B" if the opportunity plays out. It's nice to remember that these channels provide ample concrete space to help figure out the distribution side of things beyond paid acquisition. Now paid acquisition is great and all for VC backed companies, but for indie hackers, listening to and iterating /based/ off of the channel itself seems to be a real lifeline. You don't have to worry about the marginal acquisition costs that would otherwise price you out of the game entirely.

Looking at a couple of comments here, I'm seeing some eye popping figures from folks who pulled off using channel marketing for their SaaS. It's very heartening to see.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#63

Post by abinaya_rl »

alex_duf wrote: post #55
abinaya_rl wrote: post #44

I've been curating remote jobs from hundreds of remote job boards and directly sending it to job seekers to help during their job search. I'm trying to see how can I use this data to do B2B sales. Is there a market place that I can submit the remote jobs data that can be helpful.

Hey! care to share the platform? I'm interested

Sure, here you go -> https://remoteleaf.com

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#64

Post by cosmodisk »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #58
cosmodisk wrote: post #26

I work with Salesforce,so I'm quite familiar with the ecosystem. I think a lot people on HN would have a hard time believing the kind of apps that exist on AppExchange and the number of companies that are willing to spend money on them.

Hey, I've done a lot of work in the Salesforce owned (adjacent) Heroku marketplace. I'd love to connect and chat sometime about the ecosystem if you'd be up for it. My email's in my profile.

Sure.Will drop you a message at some point next week.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#65

Post by tixocloud »

davidjgraph wrote: post #21

The "indie hacker" part is underselling the value of hooking into these marketplaces. The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay. We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.

It’s a smart move for entrepreneurs who aren’t VC-backed to leverage marketplaces. How was your experience with the Atlassian Marketplace in terms of integration and marketing? I’ve seen many big companies advertise that they help with marketing resources but I assume it’s exaggerated. I presume you’d still have to do the legwork, which is fine.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#66

Post by tixocloud »

cosmodisk wrote: post #26

I work with Salesforce,so I'm quite familiar with the ecosystem. I think a lot people on HN would have a hard time believing the kind of apps that exist on AppExchange and the number of companies that are willing to spend money on them.

Given the number of companies already leveraging the marketplace, do you still see opportunities for new companies to come in? And are most opportunities focused on a vertical niche?

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#67

Post by davidjgraph »

tixocloud wrote: post #65
davidjgraph wrote: post #21

The "indie hacker" part is underselling the value of hooking into these marketplaces. The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay. We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.

It’s a smart move for entrepreneurs who aren’t VC-backed to leverage marketplaces. How was your experience with the Atlassian Marketplace in terms of integration and marketing? I’ve seen many big companies advertise that they help with marketing resources but I assume it’s exaggerated. I presume you’d still have to do the legwork, which is fine.

Atlassian's ecosystem is really good. Nothing is perfect, but we tested Google, Salesforce (horrific, but a _lot_ money in there), Dropbox and MS. Atlassian just hit the sweet spot for us.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#68

Post by ThomPete »

fasicle wrote: post #38
ThomPete wrote: post #30

We do a lot of work with SaaS businesses helping them with product design and if needed capital and development. Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus live ecommerce which seems to be the areas that are really thriving right now. Even if covid passes organizations will still be looking for tools that makes them resillient to that kind of disruption again. So plenty…

That's interesting, could you expand on this line a little more: "Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus a live ecommerce"

Sure,

With regards to the non-desktop workforce: 70% of the workforce doesn't sit behind a computer and thus really don't benefit from working from home in most cases and thus we are working on a few projects in that space.

We did a test project https://www.realwork.ai which is a tool for frontline workers built for the people in the field rather than the backoffice and allow them to communicate and mange the distributed physical work they do. We are currently looking at expanding that into more of a linkedin type of network combining the tool with the ability to find work or find workers to hire.

With regards to the educational space we are building a LMS built more like an API that allow learning institutions or organizations with the need for employee education, certificate or compliance to easily manage their students/employees education. While we offer things like video and course-building tools the idea is to allow for our customers to use the best tools for the job so ex. we support not just our own video platform but also zoom, MS teams etc.

And last but not least.

Because we built a whole video platform we are looking at another area which is live ecommerce such as the whole unboxing trend with things like collector cards as we know a few people in that space.

We are then working with founders or potential co-founders in those industries and try to see where we can find product market fit.

Re: B2B SaaS marketplaces with opportunities for indie hackers

#70

Post by randomchars »

heyoo wrote: post #41
dstick wrote: post #2

Correct me if I'm wrong but unless you're already an established brand that people actively seek out, or part of the first X listings in a category of a thing everyone wants (i.e. SEO, Ads, accounting for webshops), wouldn't you already be too late on these market places?

No. I created an app in one of these (a year ago). I have 5 serious competitors. Each are decent apps that have been in the game longer than mine - mine is not necessarily better, just with a slightly different angle. It has about $3.5k MRR, is still growing and I spend maybe 5-10 hours a month on it. Also, I had no brand before that.

Sounds cool! Mind sharing what are you working on, or at least the rough space you're in?

Also, how did you start marketing it/getting your first users?

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