Comments on: Freemium & The Evolution From a Web App To a Web Platform

By: Martin Thomas

Martin Thomas — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:55:13 +0000

Hi.. Your post got me thinking… What is more valuable for a software company (like facebook or flickr). 1,000 paying users or 100,000 non-paying users? What are your thoughts? View my blog post here: http://www.purlem.com/blog/?p=57

By: Rick Nucci

Rick Nucci — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 19:16:56 +0000

Alistair - great post. Another interesting notion is the focus a lot of these successes have. They start with a narrow but deep focus on one domain, with Freshbooks its invoicing, with Basecamp its inter-company project collaboration, with SurveyMonkey its dead simple survey creation and mgmt. It makes me wonder just how "in the know" some of the folks still straight-arming SaaS really are. Take the recent Gartner survey as an example; the audience for this survey is Gartner clients, which are primarily going to be CIO's of large enterprises. I would be willing to bet that at least 50% of the SaaS applications running in their enterprise they don't even know about! I am not saying this is a good thing, but for sure a lot of the success of SaaS is the ease at which you can get it up and running and adding value to your organization. And holistically speaking, we can't lose sight of that.

By: Ken Ross

Ken Ross — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:37:06 +0000

We at ExpertCEO use Freshbooks for our billing. The thing that has impressed me the most about the firm is the quality of their customer service. Every time you call, you’re immediately connected to a real person, and that person invariably knows the intimate details of the product and how to solve your problem or answer your question. In the long run, that type of service is integral to any company’s success.

By: David Robins

David Robins — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:49:54 +0000

It is obvious that the SaaS will gain traction in near future. Salesforce.com and others have shown the benefits of not using in house applications and relying on using applications hosted and supported by a third party over internet, whose job is the application service itself.

By: Subraya Mallya

Subraya Mallya — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:49:51 +0000

Alistair
I think the value of a platform is undeniable. In addition to providing B2B kind of functionality between tenants, the SaaS vendor can also eventually provide value added analytics, collaboration functionality. I had written in my post http://www.prudentcloud.com/saas/value-added-saas-12062008/ about some of the features we were able to provide to expand our offerings at my previous employer.

I see this eventually moving into co-operative consortiums of SaaS vendors/platforms.

Subraya Mallya

By: pwb

pwb — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:06:07 +0000

PayPal has inexplicably refrained from building out its invoicing capabilities. It’s already way bigger than FreshBooks.

And Malcolm is either dead wrong or doesn’t understand the argument (not sure which is worse).

By: Growing a SaaS Business « Fearless Bit

Growing a SaaS Business « Fearless Bit — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:42:01 +0000

[...] This article on GigaOM really caught my attention because it’s dear to the hearts of the team I work with. Creating feature after feature may not be what’s needed to grow — but rather create one or two compelling reasons to be on the platform, and then use that network effect to create additional features that benefit large numbers of users. [...]