The Great SaaS Gaslight

Summary

Pay as you go Just pay for what you need Free up time Free up capital Focus on your business not the technology But that’s not quite the way it worked out, is it? Maybe they meant it when they said it, but it is not the driving force behind the great SaaS purveyors of our day. Yeah, I am looking at you Microsoft, you too Google, and where do you think you’re hiding Intuit? There is nothing wrong with creating a product that your customer wants to buy, but something is off when the customer is forced to buy something they don’t want. Customer needs are completely secondary to customer lock-in. Sadly, the SaaS model has become too big to care about customers. They spew customer satisfaction surveys at you after every interaction in an effort to show that they care. But these surveys are just another brick in the big data wall. The results are secondary. They kind of care what you think…but mostly they just need you to hang around and keep paying. They collect the data to guide incremental improvements around the edges. The irony is that just about every SaaS vendor has created the role of customer success manager. These are people that are assigned to your account to help you onboard and have success with the product to keep you from off-boarding. Success doesn’t necessarily translate into helping your organization succeed, just that you ‘succeed’ enough with the product. I don’t begrudge anyone’s success in creating a product that customers find useful and want to buy. That is not an easy thing to do. But after a while, the SaaS business model is not about customer success or satisfaction anymore. It is about customer submission and inertia. At a certain point, the customer base becomes too big and the product becomes too big to change. Safety in Numbers It is the path of least resistance. If everyone else is doing it, it must be good or at least good enough. Plus, there is value in the network effect. Yet, numbers are only safe up to a point. Numbers blind you to un...