This will eventually turn into a longer-piece article but here’s the idea in a nutshell. These are 4 reasons why SaaS is the future.
And that’s just a clickbaity headline. What I mean, expressed in a more educated manner, is: 4 reasons why the SaaS industry is bound to keep on growing.
The way I look at it, it hasn’t even started. We’re far from the peak of this movement and dare I say it might go as far as becoming one of the standards of doing business. But I can’t know that.
Nonetheless, here they are.
1. Web apps become more and more the standard
We’ve seen it with Google and Apple facilitating progressive web apps. We see more and more of them every day.
There are definitely advantages for going down the web-app route: lightweight software and less friction on the user’s end, for one.
10 years ago software meant you had to download a package on your laptop. The App Store was just 1 year old (almost), so there was barely any “mobile app” notion.
These days — it’s all in the cloud (much like our lives soon enough). Having the web app as a standard means there’s definitely more incentive for SaaS companies to be birthed, since most of them exist this way.
2. Education is the next revolution
Reforming the way we educate people means we’re putting knowledge and skills into more hands. The SaaS “social contract” is pretty clear:
We’ve built this software. Use it, but pay us monthly so we can keep on developing (and hopefully expand it).”
Having more hands (or brains, rather) that can not only build, but keep on improving and updating a piece of software means we’re going to have more of these social contracts.
It doesn’t have to start with code but it’s definitely got to be there in today’s world. However, once education will be closer and closer to a revolution, we’re definitely going to see more no-code builders, like Webflow
3. Payments and micropayments are easier to be made
I’m looking at two things here. One, today’s world. Two, the future world.
Today’s world means Stripe and all the payment processor that make it more and more of a breeze to not only part with money at this very second, but also get into a monthly payment contract.
Whether it’s Apple Pay and Amazon Pay — or the “In App Purchase SaaS” new specie, one thing is sure: we’re definitely going towards micropayments and SaaS businesses should see only upside in this.
When I say “the future world”, I’m thinking crypto. Whatever hard limitations there are to micropayments, cryptocurrencies will eliminate them.
What specific cryptocurrency will it be — I don’t know and nor does it matter. But we are going to switch to it sooner or later and SaaS products will benefit from that.
Dare I say, we’ll even start having micro-SaaS products that will charge you by the second/minute.
4. The updated social contract
Two things getting together.
- The Social Contract, and I mean 1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Social media
Because of this new world we’re living in, we’ve seen how service becomes more and more of an important thing. Whatever people were managing to get away with 10/20/30 years ago — no more.
That’s definitely companies are picking up on and yes, “losers” at this game of customer service are very much put into the spotlight.
On a quieter note, the winners are there as well. That will change. Top level service will have to be there and, just like the name implies, Software as a Service has to have the topmost level of it.
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See you again with all these ideas when the long-form version will be written.
About Ch Daniel
I’ve updated this signature in July 2020, so older mentions of the signature might not make sense.
I currently don’t write on this blog anymore. I wrote daily for 9 months on this very blog, but now I’m focused on building the CH Group.
If you want to follow my newer articles, check out the CH Group’s blog.
See everything I do here: Chdaniel.com
