SaaS entrepreneurship, please choose a few ways to go

Edit Introduction: Management SaaS is already a mature market. To enter the field to start a business, it takes a lot of time to study how to make innovation. This article analyzes the direction of SaaS entrepreneurship. Let's take a look.

1. Anxious management SaaS

Last month, Feishu released PeOPLE products. Teacher Liu Run wrote in his article:

Excellent talents are the starting point of all business models. We (flying books) rely on our own "flying book recruitment" tools to continuously optimize the "user experience" in order to win the choice of talent in 3,000 interviews every day.

Today, I just read the Amazon Reverse Work Law, which mentioned the reason for the success of Amazon's recruitment method, but only did not mention the role of the IT system in it.

Not only Amazon, many CEO autobiography or HR management works I have read rarely use HR systems as a key factor in the success of human resource management.

Therefore, Feishu is a rare company that uses recruitment tools as a "key factor for winning talent choices".

In fact, the HR system is "ignored" by corporate operations and management books, not only the problem in the field of HR, but also the problem of the entire management SaaS.

The so -called management SaaS is SaaS products that help enterprises manage business processes and improve management efficiency, such as HR, CRM, OA, and so on.

In my new book "SaaS Product Manager", there is a detailed discussion of management, tool type, business, and platform -type SaaS.

Management software is the just -in -demand of large enterprises. After all, the process of large enterprises is complicated and strict in management. It must standardize processes and improve management efficiency through software.

However, the biggest problem of management software is that relying on software alone does not bring qualitative improvement to the management level of enterprises, which greatly limits the higher premium of management software.

More importantly, management software is a very mature market.

Not only traditional software manufacturers such as SAP and UFIDA have always occupied important markets, SaaS manufacturers such as Beisen and Sales Yi have also cultivated for many years.

Even though SaaS entrepreneurs are very confident in their own product capabilities and sales capabilities -I dare to say -to enter such a market, they need to be prepared for long -term losses.

Even the flying book PeOPLE that Mr. Liu Run admired.

2. Customers need 100%value improvement

Yu Jun, the vice president of Baidu's original product, once proposed a famous formula:

New product value> Old product value + replacement cost

Only when the value of the new product is greater than the "old product value + replacement cost" can customers use new products.

In the field of management software, "replacement costs" are actually very high.

The main reason is that management software often involves more personnel, processes and data. Once switching, not only the workload is huge, but also adapt to the new system.

Therefore, compared with the old products, if the value of only 20%of the new products increases, it is often not enough to impress customers.

For example, the "better experience", "lower cost" or "win -win subscription system" we often hang on our mouths, for customers, may belong to "20%value improvement".

What's more, if the customer is replaced from traditional software to SaaS, it is necessary to consider a series of tricky issues such as secondary development flexibility, integration with the original system, and data security.

This is why China's management SaaS company has not yet achieved large -scale profit.

If you want customers to replace the original software, and even accept standardized products and public cloud deployment, SaaS manufacturers must bring 100%value improvement to customers.

The way to achieve this way is the new products and new operations I often say.

3. Don't stick to the wrong direction

TOB is a "slow" field, but "slow" does not mean that it should be boiled endlessly.

SaaS entrepreneurs once said that his SaaS has been in operation for 5 years and still cannot see signs of rapid growth.

He believes that there is a problem with the company's sales capabilities.

In fact, the greater probability of this situation is that the direction was wrong at the beginning.

SaaS's entrepreneurial business is not only "valuable", but also the question of "how much value increases from old products".

Some SaaS entrepreneurs, who thought they were "different from others", chose a popular track to compete with the original manufacturers.

However, the result of lack of innovative homogeneous competition is that everyone is not good.

For example, as soon as the company's WeChat open interface, hundreds of SCRM manufacturers have been established quickly, and the market has entered the Red Sea state before the market has completed customer cultivation.

I dare to assert that more and more SCRM companies will fall into business dilemma.

In fact, in our SaaS executive WeChat group, there are also entrepreneurs who do SCRM, but one of them is early and the other is their own unique advantages.

For example, a SCRM for a local service, the founder has many years of offline store management experience and C -end marketing experience.

Such a SCRM has the opportunity to survive in the tragic knockout.

I often say that the product strategy determines the success or failure -the success or failure of a SaaS product is often settled before it completes the design draft.

The same is true of SaaS entrepreneurship. In the planning stage, its success or failure is basically doomed.The rest of the time is nothing more than verifying our "business assumptions".

Therefore, if SaaS operates for one year, there is still no sign of rapid growth, and there is a high probability that there is a problem with the original direction.

What we need at this time is not to persist in the wrong direction, but to actively find new opportunities for hidden opportunities, and to transform in time before the funds are exhausted.

SaaS is difficult to start a business. Instead of struggling in the quagmire, it is better to choose a few ways to go.

#Columnist#

Wang Deming, WeChat public account: To B old man, everyone is a product manager columnist, many years of Internet products and information management experience.

The original published in this article is a product manager, and reprinting is prohibited without permission.

The question map is from UNSPLASH, based on the CC0 protocol.

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