Software as a Service, often shortened as SaaS, is the industry of cloud-hosted software businesses that charge their customers a recurring, usually monthly or annual, subscription fee.
Pioneered by Salesforce, Concur, and the likes in the early 2000s, SaaS has been on a strong uptrend ever since. Today, it is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity and still growing quickly. It already has more than 50 publicly listed companies, as tracked by BVP Nasdaq’s Emerging Cloud Index, and a large number of up-and-comers.
The broader SaaS market and the successful companies in it have been hot topics in technology publications for a while now. But one specific question, responsible for ~50% of the total market cap of SaaS companies, is yet to garner much media coverage. It is: how can someone approach creating a SaaS category, i.e., a new class of SaaS software that doesn’t yet have any directly comparable products in the market?
So, as co-founder and investor of MindTickle, a SaaS platform that’s the global leader of a rapidly emerging category called sales readiness, here are the top 5 learnings on SaaS category creation from our journey.
