- Category creation in SaaS is completely overrated.
There, I said it.
And let's just assume for a second
that I've convinced you that it's true, and I will.
Now if you were to start a new SaaS business today,
if I were starting a new SaaS business today,
in this episode, I'm gonna give you the four SaaS categories
that are completely ripe for disruption today in 2021.
Intro.
(lively music)
What's up, everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable.
I'm TK, and on this channel, I help SaaS Founders like you
grow your SaaS businesses faster
with an unstoppable strategy.
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Seriously awesome to see you over here.
Now category creation, creating a new category in SaaS
is one of these coveted things.
It's a mystical thing.
Everyone wants to do it.
And everyone thinks that investors wanna see it as well.
But here's the thing that I've realized recently.
Category creation is a complete slog.
And even if you are creating a category
and somehow you actually hit the escape velocity
and actually create that category and get the early success,
pioneers always have arrows on their back.
These days, there are lots of SaaS categories
where it's going through enough of a cycle
where they're actually existing categories
that are ripe for disruption,
existing categories that investors even understand,
existing categories that if you choose to go after,
you're gonna have a higher likelihood of success
'cause a lot more stuff is figured out
and the dollars are there.
You just need to do a 10 times better experience,
which is now feasible to do.
So in this episode,
if I were to start a SaaS business today,
I'm gonna give you my four core SaaS ideas,
SaaS categories, that you can go after right now
and disrupt and win in in 2021 and beyond.
So if you're excited to dig in,
go ahead and smash that Like button,
and then we're gonna go in category number one.
So category number one are CRMs.
Let me explain.
CRMs today are incredibly ripe for disruption
because all the existing large CRM players
are continuously trying to go upmarket.
Salesforce who started as CRMs,
and is the granddaddy of CRMs,
isn't really a CRM company anymore.
They don't even specialize anymore.
They don't even think about how to transform CRMs anymore.
They're thinking about the 50 million other products
that they've acquired that they're now trying to sell.
On top of that, if you think about HubSpot,
HubSpot, which got into CRMs,
which now is super focused on CRMs,
their CRM is actually not that great.
I mean, I use it, I recommend it,
it's one of the best out there,
but it's not that great when it comes to a CRM.
Then you've got Pipedrive,
which is now owned by Vista Private Equity,
which means that not a lot of product innovation
is probably going to happen.
They're gonna be much more of a sales-driven model
to grow it.
It means that CRMs today,
if you wanna go after the top dog status of a CRM,
of really reimagining how a CRM should work,
how it should flow,
how you can actually manage customer relationships,
then you should go after this category
because right now, if you were to start a CRM company,
everyone understands what this category is,
everyone agrees that it's a shitty experience right now,
and if you can dream up a better way
to actually create a CRM and have a better experience,
you're gonna be successful.
There's already some people that are doing this.
One of the new products
that I really like in the CRM category
are done by my friends over at Scratchpad.
Scratchpad sits on top of Salesforce
and treats Salesforce as a database
and completely reimagines the user interface for a CRM.
That's one way you can actually start
to disrupt the CRM category
and then eventually start to own it.
So CRMs, number one, incredibly ripe for disruption
because most of the companies that are top dogs
are just kind of not in an R&D mode.
They're just really in a point
of, like, "How do we just charge our customers more
and sell 'em more things?"
Which is exactly when they can be disrupted
through innovation.
The second category
that I think is completely ripe for disruption
is marketing automation.
Now I worked on Marketo.
Marketo bought my company ToutApp.
We did a two-year transformation.
We sold it to Adobe for $4.75 billion.
I know marketing automation relatively well.
And when it comes to marketing automation,
the top dogs were Eloqua, Marketo, and HubSpot.
Eloqua got bought by Oracle,
and then we never heard from them ever again,
which is why Marketo transformation worked really well
because Marketo then went into the enterprise
and started to do really well.
Then now that Marketo's acquired by Adobe,
who knows what they're doing?
Like, I honestly don't know, I haven't kept up.
And HubSpot recently said, you know what?
Even though they started with marketing automation,
they're not just marketing software anymore,
they're now a CRM software.
They're trying to be more of a CDP,
a Customer Database Platform,
and they're trying to go upmarket,
which all that means is that marketing automation
is ripe for disruption
because the biggest players in there
are just off, kind of at the beach doing their thing.
This means that if you were to start
a brand new marketing automation company today,
you could actually disrupt that market.
You could come up with a brand new way
of doing marketing automation.
Reimagining how you capture leads and nurture people.
Reimagining how B2B marketing should work.
Marketing automation is my second most favorite category
that you can go disrupt today and probably get away with it
because everyone understands what a marketing automation is
and no one loves the current platforms that are out there
because they haven't innovated.
They really have not innovated.
Oh, before I go into number three,
let me just pause here for a second.
Are you starting to see the power in this?
On one hand, you can try to go create a new category,
go educate that market, convince people they need it,
convince Forrester and Gartner
that there should be a quadrant around it.
Convince investors that there's a real promise here.
And then maybe get some success.
And once you figure all that out,
others can come in and you can have arrows on your back.
Or you can go after some of these categories
that have already gone through a cycle.
They were winners, they're clear budget, established,
it's obviously needed, they got exited.
Now they're off, fat, happy on the beach,
and now you can go create a new version of these
in a whole new way.
Are you starting to see the differences?
If you're starting to see the difference,
can I just get a yes in the comments below?
Also, smash that Like button for the YouTube algorithm.
Also, if you're in this early stage
of building a SaaS business,
be sure to check out my 5-Point SaaS Strategy Guide.
Inside of that guide,
I help you think about the five key pillars
that make for a successful SaaS business
beyond just the idea, and how you can plot those out.
I'll give you links to additional videos
around each of those five pillars as well.
I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video.
Let's go to category number three.
The third category, ripe for disruption,
seriously, seriously ripe for disruption
is support, ticketing, and help desk systems.
So one of the big players in this is Zendesk.
Zendesk is public.
We used to use Zendesk at ToutApp, amazing platform.
There's a long tail of players.
In addition to that, Intercom is kind of playing in there.
Salesforce, they used to have a help desk platform.
They still do, and it's massive and kind of boring.
But here's the thing.
No one gets excited about help desk software,
but help desk software is super important
in order for our business to be successful.
Customer experience is more important than ever.
There's more channels
through which customers want to talk to you
than ever before.
There is chat, there's Messenger, there's WhatsApp,
there's phone, there's so many touch points.
There's the website.
So reimagining the help desk experience,
reimagining how support tickets should work,
how email tickets should work,
how support teams can better support customers,
it's an incredible opportunity.
It's a well-defined category.
There's no companies innovating anymore in it.
It's just kind of status quo for them,
fat and happy in the beach, which means that if you come in
and you say, "We're gonna build
a 10 times better help desk experience,"
you could be massively successful.
And there are lots of investors
that would wanna go after that piece of the pie.
So category number three,
support, ticketing, help desk systems, super awesome.
Now I have a fourth one, a fourth one.
Do you guys wanna go into the fourth one?
Is it okay if I go in the fourth one?
I wanna make sure I overdeliver here.
So the fourth one, this is one that I also like
that I think is like a little bit under the radar
but I think it's gonna be ripe for disruption
very, very soon, both in the enterprise
and in the mid-market.
It's applicant tracking systems.
Now applicant tracking systems are boring.
No one thinks about it, but we're entering this new era
of remote work where everyone can work everywhere
and talent being unlocked in a way like never before.
This means that companies have to rise up to the challenge
of sourcing talent wherever they can find it globally.
And this means that they're gonna need a whole new way
of tracking all these applications, all these candidates,
marketing to those people, attracting that talent,
and actually closing those deals with them
and getting them to work for the company.
This will require a whole new way of thinking
about HR systems and applicant tracking systems,
which means that they're ripe for disruption as well.
Now the big players in applicant tracking systems,
you've got iCIMS on the enterprise side,
you've got Greenhouse and Lever on the mid-market side,
and there's a long tail in the small business side.
All of them are cycling in one way, shape, or form,
either private equity-owned or they are much larger,
so they're not innovating as much
and they're trying to think
about how to just go after that market.
So that means they're ripe for disruption,
which means applicant tracking system is a huge way
that you can go disrupt this market
if you can reimagine how you can go after this.
Now these are my four, hot categories,
four, hot SaaS ideas that you can go after today.
Existing categories, well-defined, with budget
that you can disrupt with better innovative experiences.
Now what does that look like?
Well, that's up to you.
How do you actually craft a better SaaS experience
to actually say, "You know what?
The shitty CRM that you use, that you don't even like using,
you don't need to use that anymore, ours is way better."
Go check out Scratchpad.
You'll get an idea
of what that innovative experience looks like.
Or you go into marketing automation and say, "You know what?
Here's a whole new way of generating demand."
Or you go into your help desks and say,
"Help desks are horrible experiences.
No one wants to be a number and a support ticket.
We're gonna have a whole new way of engaging this."
Or you go into applicant tracking systems.
These are my four categories,
and these are four categories that are ripe for disruption
if you can get creative
and create a much more innovative way
of actually solving the problems,
getting these companies the results.
They will listen to you
because as much as they use these systems
and they may be part of multi-year deals,
they also kind of aren't happy with them.
And if there's a better alternative,
they will at least give it a shot.
And you could, little by little, take over the market,
which is super powerful and super exciting.
Now if you're trying to develop a SaaS idea,
I have two other videos that you might wanna check out.
The first video are the three golden SaaS types.
There's only three types of SaaS businesses
that are worth going after.
Three types of SaaS business, I go into that,
you can check out this video.
The other video I have are the big macrotrends that exist,
2020 to 2025.
For the next five years, big SaaS trends.
You can check out that video over here.
And the third video I have, I actually did a YouTube Live
on another way to find really great SaaS ideas
is to look at startups that recently got Series B funding.
To learn more about that strategy,
you can check out this video over here.
So three more videos
to help you find even more great SaaS ideas
in addition to the four categories
I talked through here on great SaaS categories
that are ripe for disruption in an also huge, massive times.
If you got value from this video,
be sure to smash that Like button.
I drop a video like this three times a week,
bringing you actionable strategies
on how to grow your SaaS business,
so be sure to hit the Subscribe button and the bell icon.
Oh also, I have my 5-Point SaaS gold strategy guide.
You can download that below
or just go to the link getunstoppable.com/strategy.
You can download it there.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
for their life and their business,
but when you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK, and I'll see you in the next episode.