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I’ve been following the saas industry for a while (7+ years) and I’ve been through its growth and the adoption of it. For anyone entering the internet now, SaaS is a norm - It was not 10 years ago.
In the past 2 years, I’ve had multiple encounters where I pondered how this model would look like in the future.
Here’s my take on it
Next 5 years and a little beyond
- Niece software will be growing in popularity and sales
- There will be a lot of software in the theme “Usecase X for industries Y/ community Y”
- There is already traction for these types of companies
- This niece software will initially have a higher price point and gradually reduce the pricing point
- Currently, SaaS apps are tied together by native integrations with each other and integration platforms in the IFTT model.
- IFTT model integrations are being exploited now. There will be new protocols to openly integrate natively with any software by the vendor themselves
- The big players in the industry will lean towards building an ecosystem of software
- Regulations will force SaaS companies to be data-portable-ready or at least data-exit-ready
- The OSs we are using will get native integrations with apps that we use - read, write, search, action, etc
- Usage-based pricing over fixed subscriptions will get some momentum
- Micro SaaS would rise faster and could fall faster too. With an ever-growing stack of software, there will be plugins and small tools that solve very niche pain problems that could gain traction in marketplaces
- Branding and UX would become the key differences over utility in many software categories
- Solution Experts and influencers will be playing key roles in the Sales
The rise of Web3 could bring out some crazy changes to the way we interact with software. I’ll write about my take on a different note. (We need to wait and see the adoption and technology advancement to see if Web3 would actually make a drastic change or not)
You've got any further thoughts? I’ve would love to listen to you