“SaaS is the greatest business model of all” is something I’ve heard once or twice, and I’m slowly beginning to come round to it. Why?
First of all, what is a “SaaS” business model?
SaaS stands for software as a service. A SaaS product is a web-based software product that people pay to use. An example of a small SaaS product would be a tool to help you schedule your social media posts. Large SaaS products are Salesforce or the Google suite of office products (Google Docs, Google Sheets and so on).
And why is it so great?
Imagine you are running a hotel. Guests pay you per night. So far, so normal.
Now imagine that the hotel has infinite rooms. The hotel will never be full, you can keep adding guests!
Now imagine that the hotel is run by robots. It is completely autonomous. Once a guest is inside, you can forget about her forever, because the robots are looking after her.
Now imagine that any improvement you make to one of the rooms (such as installing a PlayStation) is immediately available in all rooms. The robots took care of it!
Let’s go further: the guests don’t have to travel to stay in your fantastic hotel. They just push a button, wherever they may be, and they instantly get teleported into the hotel lobby where a nice robot asks them for their credit card.
You, as the manager, have one job: get people through the door of your hotel and make sure they stay for as long as possible.
That sound like a weird hotel, I admit. But that’s not the point!
It sounds like an awesome business, no?
That (with a few complications here and there) is how SaaS works and why it’s so awesome.
It’s what I am trying to achieve with my SaaS business. In the end, I am trying to build a machine that runs in the cloud and prints money.
Follow me on my journey to find out if I succeed!
