The business of SaaS

Patrick McKenzie’s newest article, The business of SaaS, is a good read. It helped me understand that there is a big difference in the sales approach between what he calls “low-touch SaaS” and “high-touch SaaS”.

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I’m starting a campaign to call Patrick the SaaS Whisperer.
He’s always got thoughtful stuff, esp on SaaS.

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What kind of SAAS is Feature Upvote @SteveMcLeod?

Im really trying to make Parserr a low touch SAAS but its increasingly difficult as competitors drop prices. Any business with integrations into other software becomes really hard to run in a low touch model. There are very high expectations for prices that are really deemed in the low touch category

Feature Upvote is absolutely, definitely a low-touch SaaS! At least that is my guiding intention.

This is partly why I’ve so far eschewed the conventional SaaS three-tier pricing, with a way higher “enterprise plan”. I want my pricing to signal that this is a self-service model.

Nevertheless, some trial customers have started asking for live demos. In the short term, I’ll do live demos because it is a valuable way to get some customer insight. Long-term, though, I’m wondering if this is incompatible with the low-touch SaaS model that Patrick describes in the article.

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Out of curiosity, which integrations are you finding highly requested?

You should create detailed guides, and the guides should be easy to find when they are needed. For low-touch model, it is a requirement. Users should have means to resolve their problems by themselves.

I recently did an experiment. No one answered our support tickets for a week. Even did not look at them at all. In the end of the week, most support tickets were like “OK I found a solution”.

On the other end, if tickets are answered rapidly, like within 12 hours, this speed things up and the amount of support is increasing. This way things start to move towards “high-touch” model. Customers know the answers are fast and do not bother solving problems by themselves.

And that is exactly what Im investing in! Funny you say that, cause its taken me so long to do it… and i just started doing it seriously this week with drip videos and more guides on our site.

I have been so careful to answer every enquiry that I have given myself no time to automate it. The joys of a solo bootstrapper.

I have competitors on here so ill PM you my highly requested integrations @SteveMcLeod :slight_smile:

That is one ballsy experiment! :smiley:

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Are you integrating with Zappier? I believe they are solving exactly this problem - instead of providing a custom integration with whatever system the customer has, just integrate with Zappier and let the customer to integrate Zappier with their own systems the way they like.