Both the degree of acceptance and the process of commercialization have been strengthened as never before. We are more optimistic about the new opportunities for SaaS.
Slack’s entrepreneurial experience is extremely interesting. Founder Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian. In 2002, he opened a company in Vancouver and developed an online game called Game Neverending. The game was not successful. By the way, a photo sharing platform Flickr was fired. People have used it) and was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.
Stewart continued to pursue his dreams in 2009 and started a new online game, Glitch. As a result, like the last time, the game was not made, but a team chat tool developed by the way was fired and became the Slack of tens of billions of dollars today.
Slack pioneered a unique sales model for the Saas field: To C and To B.
The successful SaaS companies in the past mostly deal with management issues in large enterprises, and are sales-oriented, demonstrating products to company decision makers for trial and procurement. Slack puts the focus on the user experience of the terminal, so that every user loves to use this product. Slack uses To C to promote it, allowing small teams within the company to use it spontaneously, then spread within the enterprise, and finally let the company pay for it with extremely low cost of sales and extremely fast sales.
Because the product is easy to use, the customer’s repurchase rate is also extremely high. In the 19 years after the listing, its net dollar retention is still a staggering 143%. Good products and bottom-up sales models have brought new ideas to corporate service companies.
In the United States, for To B companies, good sales are only one aspect, and excellent products can truly capture the hearts of users.
Good products will win, this is our special feeling in the United States. American customers have already recognized the value of SaaS, and the payment habits have been well cultivated. Therefore, even in the extremely subdivided fields, as long as the products that are good and meet the needs of customers are used, there are loyal customers who use them. Continue to far exceed the expected income. Therefore, this is also the golden age of American application layer entrepreneurs. Finding your own segmentation, doing valuable products, and building competent sales, the company can grow up step by step.
Case a few examples: Most of the companies that GGV visited this time will have several iPads at the front desk to allow visitors to sign in, and even small companies with only a few dozen employees will do the same. And we found that behind these iPads is actually a SaaS sign-in product from a company called Envoy, and the company that made the visitor sign-up business has raised $43 million.
We visited this trip