Abhishek Rungta

Like many entrepreneurs of my generation, I was always in awe of SaaS business model. And of course, wanted to build one. In fact I got an opportunity to see some of these companies being built from close quarters due to my part-time angel investing career, and in a couple of cases, a little more than an audience.

With my limited knowledge, I feel that there are major limitations to this business model. And, I think I we offer a better model at Indus Net Technologies (INT.) in many ways. I am happy to change my mind, if there is strong and logical counter arguments.

1) SaaS is more delivered like a Software-as-a-Subscription. There is NO or Very Little service element.

Apart from a “Customer Success” role, there is not much done to make a client’s SaaS implementation successful. In the name of service you can create tickets, where most of the time you get canned answers which don’t help much.

2) The price of software keeps going high, and sales team keeps upselling-crossselling, and add licenses, and funny policies to generate more cash (mostly due to QoQ, YoY revenue pressure from investors). The ROI keeps going down in most cases. We were on the receiving end, and in last six months, we were able to reduce our SaaS spend by 50%. I spoke to few more business owners, and they discovered the same. In fact even the IaaS seems overpriced, and businesses have successfully turned back to colocation happily saving 30-60% of their server costs.

3) Most SaaS software are the same! They can be built by any decent software company. And with AI, it is going to become a consumer product. The real value is in aligning the software to business process, and align to the unique value proposition of the business. And this needs deep connect, and a service centric attitude – which is often looked down upon by most of the SaaS founders.

4) Its a sales and marketing game – and not a problem solving, value creation sport. Whenever I spoke to a SaaS founder, most of the time I heard words like ARR, AOV, ACV, LTV, CAC. If you notice, these are all inward looking metrics. It’s about their success. Where is the customers’ success?

I am launching an experiment for next three months. I will give my enterprise-grade product to ten clients FREE of COST.

They only need to hire my developers (at a reasonable market price) to configure, customise, service, make changes, and adapt the software to their needs. No monthly charges. No usage based fees.

Just high quality service – at least you know what you are paying for! We only get paid for what we deliver to YOU.

Sounds like a deal? Let us our SERVICE back into Software-as-a-Service.

I am writing and initiating this from the inspiring Bay Area – where innovation is in the air.