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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

#81

Post by kenbolton »

ghaff wrote: post #75
nprateem wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to choose between owning the sales relationship or the technology I know which I'd choose. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Pretty much any on-prem software vendor is some mix of direct sales, partner sales, and through distribution. And in the case of, say, a product primarily for SMBs, the mix is probably going to tilt pretty heavily to partners. There's a lot of leverage to using partners and many of them will know and be connected to some market a lot better than you do. There are differences with SaaS but they may not be as big as yo…

I bumped into a friend on the street a year ago he and told me about the business he had recently co-founded and taken through YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/partnered. I told my co-founder about it and it became a significant part of his sales toolbox. I saw my friend last week and shared the single criticism my co-founder had. My friend told me they had recently been acquired by a competitor whose core functionality resolved our pain-point.

Strategic partnerships and white-labelling seem to be critical tools for growth in the current climate.

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

#82

Post by kappuchino »

Honestly, I'm confused. This is at #13 at my time of writing. Never seen such low quality post (from my point of view) that high up and discussed like it adds value top ... what? whom?. Is this the eternal september Moment of hacker news?

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

#83

Post by ghaff »

kenbolton wrote: post #81
ghaff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much any on-prem software vendor is some mix of direct sales, partner sales, and through distribution. And in the case of, say, a product primarily for SMBs, the mix is probably going to tilt pretty heavily to partners. There's a lot of leverage to using partners and many of them will know and be connected to some market a lot better than you do. There are differences with SaaS but they may not be as big as yo…

I bumped into a friend on the street a year ago he and told me about the business he had recently co-founded and taken through YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/partnered . I told my co-founder about it and it became a significant part of his sales toolbox. I saw my friend last week and shared the single criticism my co-founder had. My friend told me they had recently been acquired by a competitor whose core…

Whether or not there's any white-labeling involved, partnerships (VARs, SIs, now often public cloud providers, etc.) have been a key part of sales strategy for many types of products for decades.

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

#84

Post by dzhiurgis »

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…

> hundreds of people have pleaded

IMO your company just made wrong decision buying whatever you stuck with. I have a feeling this is about much smaller companies.

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

#85

Post by kimi »

kamma4434 wrote: post #39

My company does this. Apart from our main market, we have a significant number of white labellers who work in the telco space and need Stu else to sell in order to get better revenue or to offer more services. From what I’m understanding, they are doing pretty well. They wouldn’t make enough money to justify developing the product on their own, but they definitely make good margins. We develop a system to add contact…

Selling stuff != developing stuff. If you can develop and they can sell (and I guess you'd develop the product in any case) it's a win-win.

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

#86

Post by kenbolton »

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…

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, we go through an all-hands soul-searching to understand the "why". Our group and individual integrity is, at the end of the day, the only thing we really have.

I want to point out that "side hustle" should not be a dirty word. I introduce myself as a professional sea kayak instructor and guide with a side hustle as a founding software engineer. My colleague introduces himself as a sea kayak instructor and guide with a side hustle as a high school math teacher and director of the school district's drama program. Autobiography is a skill we should all practice; how you write and speak about yourself translates quickly into who you will become.

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

#87

Post by dgellow »

kappuchino wrote: post #82

Honestly, I'm confused. This is at #13 at my time of writing. Never seen such low quality post (from my point of view) that high up and discussed like it adds value top ... what? whom?. Is this the eternal september Moment of hacker news?

People upvote the headline, not the article content

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

#88

Post by repomies69 »

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…

It sucks from employee perspective, but the thing that matters in the end is what you see under the bottom line. I'm pretty sure this is financially the most sensible option for many companies in certain niches. Doesn't mean it is necessarily nice thing to work with, which can be quite different thing.

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

#89

Post by dc-programmer »

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/

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

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

#90

Post by al_borland »

kenbolton wrote: post #86
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…

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 shipping, YouTube Shorts/TikTok that just steal content from other people, being a middleman for credit card processing, crypto/NFTs, arbitrage plays that involve gutting store inventory or show tickets that hurt normal consumers (if people want to do the work to hit up garage sales and stuff that's fine), etc.

That being said, I do like the idea of leading with your passion instead of what would generally be considered your primary job. It gives people a lot better idea of who you are, or at least what you'd actually want to talk about.

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