Good SaaS Business Observation Imitation Series
Editor’s Note: This article comes from WeChat public account “SaaS Juyitang” (ID: saasjyt ) , author: Chunyang brother.
As a SaaS observation media and entrepreneur, a question I often get asked is, what are the good business and what are the bad business in SaaS?
This question is actually not easy to answer, because there are bad ones in good business and good ones in bad business, but if we have to subdivide, we can look at it this way.
“SaaS products: solve” in-company “problems or” inter-company “problems?”
In the past ten years, most SaaS product forms have focused on solving “intra-company” business issues, such as CRM to optimize sales and marketing workflows (Salesforce abroad, and Whale in China) SCRM), HR SaaS that solves HR and financial processes (Workday abroad, simple fee control in China), each department may have several SaaS products to solve the corresponding problems.
A lot of entrepreneurs, including me, don’t realize what’s wrong with this form of SaaS. Until this epidemic crisis brought us a heads-up drink.
Which companies are going up against the trend and growing in this outbreak? Except for the remote collaboration products that we are familiar with (such as video conferencing), virtually all enterprise services that require intercompany communication will benefit from this.
The inter-company SaaS must connect at least two companies and solve the needs and problems of the two companies, such as the well-known remote conference (Zoom), electronic contract (French), online documents (Graphite document) and other SaaS forms.
This type of SaaS has obvious advantages over SaaS that solves the company’s internal workflow:
With the network effect of scale, one company will drive another one or more companies to use the service, with a potential self-propagation effect
Product value and positioning are clearer and easier for customers to get started
Low customer acquisition cost (relative) and higher contract renewal rate (relative)
I call such inter-company communication SaaS a good business in SaaS. But good business may not be easy to do.
From a competition perspective, the business of remote video conferencing is actually bad because there are too many giantsThere are Zoom and Dingding in the front, WeChat and Huawei WeLink in the back, and flying books in the middle. In Baidu’s full-time, this kind of warfare basically has nothing to do with small and medium SaaS.
I call such a business a “bad business in good SaaS.”
So what are the “good businesses in good SaaS”? When thinking about this, we had better think a few more steps.
Determining a superior SaaS form is not difficult, but will the giants cut in? In the past few years, the market has been telling the story of vertical SaaS. The reason is very simple. Vertical SaaS is not blocked by giants, and it can even rely on giant ecosystems to supplement customer resources. For example, there are praises (listed) in e-commerce, Ucloud (listed, of course, Ucloud should be classified as PaaS) in the game cloud, and guest clouds (have been acquired by Ali 800 million) in the restaurant … …
So the first question: a good SaaS business, it is best not to be good enough to attract giants to participate.
A little observation, it is not difficult to find that, in fact, the giants are also looking for corporate service opportunities for inter-company communication, but they only care about the connection, but they may not care about the scene. Video conferencing is an exception. Because video conferencing is also a form of communication. Chinese Internet companies may have realized for a long time that whoever has the communication relationship has the right to speak. This is already too obvious in Tencent.
But there are too many scenarios for communication. Collaborative communication is one aspect, such as text, video, or document collaboration, but communication in business processes is rarely noticed. If I call the former “informal communication”, then business process communication including contract transfer and signing of agreement documents can be called “rigid communication”.
Here we have to mention an electronic signing company.
I noticed that the company is out of our own company’s contracting needs, because customers work from home, do not have official seals, and cannot express delivery, so I proposed that we use electronic signatures. Prior to this, I knew DocuSign Electronic signing company, but it does not seem to be open to domestic companies, so I had to find domestic electronic signing SaaS services.
Every epidemic. .
How convenient and fast is electronic signing?
We launched at 11:24 in the morning, and the client signed the contract after 24 minutes. This has a huge impact on the traditional contract signing experience.
24 minutes to complete the first electronic contract signing
Fada Wechat Mini Program Online Signing
The word is ugly, but it has legal effect.
After tasting the sweetness of electronic contracts, I realized that I might have missed a promising SaaS company, so I deliberately researched U.S. stocks and saw that foreign electronically signed SaaS listed company DocuSign was used by many research institutions It is strongly recommended to buy. The reason is very simple. Just one keyword: “Growth”. Now that large-scale remote offices have begun in Europe and the United States due to the impact of the epidemic, companies cannot meet, express delivery is interrupted, and the need for electronic contract signing. Bound to skyrocket. (Note: The study of US stocks is only for study and discussion, this article does not have any investment suggestion tendency.)
As a typical benchmarking company for DocuSign in China, they have also been led by Tencent in the recent C round of financing. I am also particularly curious about how their business has grown in this outbreak.
So I contacted the founder and CEO of FaDa Huang Xiang in WeChat. His feedback is also very simple and straightforward:
During the epidemic period, the average daily user registration volume of the website is 8 times that of usual times, and the peak value can reach 20 times.
Since the signing applet has been online for more than a month, the weekly registered user growth has remained above 150%
While envying their growth figures, I’m even more relieved that their family is almost perfectly in line with my expectations for a future SaaS company.
“Good future SaaS: the benefits of policy orientation”
Last Sunday, I went out to dinner with a member of the SaaS Juyitang WeChat group, and she asked me a very disturbing question, “Why does the development of the domestic SaaS CRM market lag behind foreign countries?” / p>
SaaS veterans will not have a hard time answering this question. In addition to the clichéd factors such as collaboration habits and willingness to pay, what is more terrible is the issue of driving policy support.
One of my favorite SaaS observation authors, Dai Ke, once wrote a ” China> One of the important reasons why CRM has a market in the US and Europe is that US and European companies have rigid requirements for sales specifications, management processes, and transaction compliance, and CRM has become a necessity. But domestic companies do n’t have these requirements, ”so I deliberately checked what are the hard requirements.
Public information shows that “In December 1994, the government information technology service group established by the US government emphasized that information technology should be used to assist government-customer interactions and establish customer-oriented e-government … In May 1995, Clinton signed the “Government Paper Elimination Act”, which requires federal and state government agencies to submit forms using electronic means. As far as possible, paperless government office operations will be completed by October 2003, thereby The interaction between the American people and their government is becoming electronic. “
This information may not have much to do with CRM, but at least we can see that early policy support has a significant effect on the advancement of government and enterprise informatization. The lag of domestic CRM has a lot to do with the too weak foundation of informatization.
We have done enough derivation, it is not difficult to see that if a SaaS business can be positively related to the government’s policy orientation, then it is undoubtedly a great advantage.
In 2019, I have always had an idea that if the blockchain policy support advocated by the Chinese government can be combined with SaaS, the scene should be wonderful.
Although there are indeed some SaaS blockchain applications in foreign countries, so far in China, I have not seen that even a SaaS is properly linked to the blockchain.
According to Huang Xiang, electronic signing is one of the natural SaaS forms combined with blockchain technology. The entire process of online signing based on blockchain certificate technology has fundamentally ensured the signing of contracts. The entire process of party identity information and signing behavior can be traced, traceable, and cannot be tampered with.
Actually, I think the combination of blockchain and SaaS is not without reason.
“Good SaaS in the future: imagination brought by infrastructure such as blockchain technology”
If we further abstract enterprise services, there are actually three layers: the infrastructure layer (IaaS), the platform layer (PaaS), and the application layer (SaaS). Obviously, blockchain as a kind of infrastructure is well developed. Under the circumstances, it is entirely possible to hatch a variety of SaaS applications, but only the availability and landing of the scene.
Second, blockchain technology, as a natural technical form to solve the “inter-company” problem, itself meets our definition of SaaS good business.
Tom Tunguz, a U.S. SaaS critic I particularly like, once stated in his blog: Over time, the blockchain ’s distributed database will find important applications in business, and funding will follow.
It means that when the distributed database of the blockchain can find a place in enterprise services, the funds will quickly keep up. So the combination of blockchain + SaaS is mainly stuck at this stage of business application scenarios.
After all, before CRM was born, who knew what CRM was?
“Good SaaS in the future: the possibility of landing with communication platform”
What is a communication relationship platform? E-mail counts one, barely counts one (because the current communication is mainly conducted within the company, not between companies), WeChat and enterprise WeChat count two.
Why should I separate this out? We have mentioned in the above analysis that Chinese Internet giants like to monopolize communication relationships. Communication relationships have always meant business opportunities, including a SCRM project (Whale Qi) that I am currently engaged in, and also relying on WeChat and Enterprise WeChat as an “intercompany” business solution. Why foreign Slack is so optimistic for investors is also because they have mastered the communication relationship between enterprises. This is not surprising even Google and Microsoft have failed.
My previous article “ Some trends and ideas about SaaS, corporate WeChat and the Industrial Internet in 2020 ” have been expressed more than once, corporate WeChat is actually equivalent to a communication platform like Slack, and the only thing they lack is thousands of thousands The business scenario built on this platform, and Whale SCRM is just one of the solutions in the field of customer relations.
When I researched this SaaS company, I noticed a scene that is easy to be ignored. This scene is probably like this:
“In response to the pain points faced by different industries during the epidemic period, we quickly launched emergency solutions for special periods. For example, we cooperated with Tencent Cloud to launch the” quick deployment version “of the anti-epidemic situation in the virtual business hall, which is based on the rapid deployment of WeChat applets. It can be deployed for a bank as soon as 2 days. “
Frankly, facing financial institutions such as banks, SaaS companies usually do not have a better response because they have too high requirements for customer service data privacy and must be stored in their own servers. The biggest problem with private deployment is the cost of landing, but the “small program” as a carrier for rapid deployment naturally solves this problem.
A small program is a link that must not be ignored in communication platforms such as WeChat and Enterprise WeChat. Even I think that this carrier alone may give birth to several highly valued SaaS companies. What problem is solved? If you know that there is a SaaS company called Showpad in foreign countries, they just got a round D financing of 70 million US dollars in June 2019. Why? Due to the length of this article, I will explain this company and the SaaS gold rush opportunity in the applet in detail in another article at the end of the month.
In this article, I did not use the usual indicators of customer acquisition cost, contract renewal rate, and customer unit price to judge the quality of a SaaS company, but made some preliminary judgments based solely on the market environment.
SaaS practitioners in China should not just complain about the inherent market defects. The so-called payment habits and willingness are just a shame for market sales and product solutions. Even if they do, this problem is not just your family. Correct. In my opinion, the Chinese market has specific advantages that are incomparable abroad. Apart from that, we only talk about WeChat and corporate WeChat, and even the ecology of nailing and flying books. Many people have not even figured out the way. No matter how powerful the private domain traffic calls, everyone ’s customer acquisition literacy is still not high, so this is the threshold, and SaaS vendors, including Whale SCRM, are committed to improving each other ’s customer literacy.
A lot of good business is bad. Bad business is also messed up by good ones.