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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

#61

Post by kenbolton »

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.

We have our own customers, too. In addition, the folks white-labelling use us in-house. We aren't strangers to the companies receiving our white-labelled SaaS; we do the initial customer on-boarding and provide all the higher-tier support.

Eleven years and counting....

But hey, you do you! I will be long retired by the time anyone gains traction with a competing offering. See you on the beach!

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

#62

Post by al_borland »

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 on your changes (rightfully so). Internally, hundreds of people have pleaded for my company to start making our own competitor instead of continuing to just rebrand this other piece of software. Now the vendor is changing their entire business model, so we basically just have to send our traffic to them so we have 0 control of the customer experience at that point.

This just seems like a "get rich quick with no effort" article, but I guess I shouldn't expect anything different from a site like "side hustle nation". Maybe white label software will become the new drop shipping... which is also awful for anyone who actually cares about their customers and the quality of the product they ship.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by smashah »

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.

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

#65

Post by renewiltord »

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.

Traditional ETL tools focused on getting data out of services and into a few places like a relational DB, S3, or some other such aggregated storage so they were read-only from services and read/write to DBs.

Reverse ETL is marketing to differentiate to the customer that you're pushing data into services as well, so that it's read/write to all.

Of course the concept is amusing to someone talking about ETL, but the market moved at some point to refer to the first functionality as ETL and so this is just a change to differentiate.

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

#66

Post by stuven »

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 different language than most of our engineers knew, and had pretty much no documentation. We didn't know enough about their software to fix new bugs easily as they came up, and didn't have enough `people * time` to figure out enough to fix the old ones.

Entwining our business with theirs was a good way to get off the ground. But when they crashed they nearly took us with them.

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

#67

Post by rr808 »

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.

This is actually a great business model. Most Americans underestimate how big the world is. You'll never be #1 in Brazil and Pakistan and the Philippines, South Africa, Egypt etc etc if you do it yourself, but resellers can make a great living off that.

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

#68

Post by ako »

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?

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

#69

Post by dc-programmer »

tyingq wrote: post #14

I'm surprised it doesn't mention selling "mash ups". I imagine there's some opportunities to talking to one service and decorating it with associated data from another service. Or even just better thought out aggregated services from one provider. I suppose then it's engineering, but the kind of thing an out of the box api proxy could do with just configuration. A proxy would also open up opportunities like serving c…

Someone should create a startup that offers SaaS attribute entity resolution in Log4j

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

#70

Post by onmobile2022 »

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
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