The rise of SaaS sprawl and software-management software
7 minute read
TL;DR-
Many companies profit off your growing company for what we recognize as the most powerful asset of modern businesses: software.
Leveraging software is our secret to organize and operate remote-first teams, optimize and control the cost of bootstrapping a business, and making those businesses successful.
We are building a platform that unifies all of the concerns that come with depending on SaaS, so you can accelerate operations and build highly successful businesses.
Introduction
We’ve worked with a lot of businesses in our careers. From one of the most successful eCommerce websites, products which patients use connected with their brains, website builders, gaming companies. One of us has even sent things to space in one of our previous businesses. And all of these businesses had one thing in common: they heavily relied on software to get things done.
In order for modern companies to succeed they need to rely on software in order to build products smarter, innovate faster, maintain remote-first workspaces, and depend less on people-management, and more on software-management software. We hope that you can join us on this journey.
Some context
Behind every successful venture there is a great, cross functional team, that has the ability needed to ship a product and learn from customers. Commonly, the skills required to ship are skills like design, product management, tech, legal, data, sales, marketing, research, etc. If you do not have all of the skills needed to run a successful operations, you should evaluate software to fill the void. For design, use FontAwesome or TailwindUI. For legal, use Iubenda or Clio. For tech, use Stripe for handling payments, or Auth0 to handle authentication, or MailChimp for marketing campaigns. The list goes on and on. Software fills in for where talent is missing, and it has been our secret to testing business ideas quickly.
The need for SaaS becomes ever more immediate for small businesses. Why is that? Because speed is essential for startups. Without speed, there is inevitable failure. SaaS shifts away maintenance/development responsibilities over to your vendors, so you can focus on speed and growth.
We know every business uses software in one way or another. But those same businesses often manage hundreds, if not thousands, of software subscriptions. From version-management systems, email automation, social media planners, chat software, customer support, accounting software, design software, etc.
The problem companies (both big and small) run into when leveraging software is managing the sheer complexity of having so many things to keep track of. Keeping tabs on security, renewal calendar, on-boarding and off-boarding, and simply keeping a vendor directory up to date, become daunting tasks for a growing business. We ran into these challenges time and time again in our careers.
Businesses need a simple place to manage the software they depend on, an easy way to discover all the vendors they depend on, and a powerful enough platform for their entire team to collaborate on.
Why not use spreadsheets?
Sure, you could be successful with a spreadsheet, we’re happy to be proven wrong. Hell here’s a SaaS management spreadsheets for free. If you’re confident enough that such a solution would work for your organization, you can stop reading this page right now. But we don’t think it’s the right solution. In fact, we think this solution isn’t a solution at all, but it’s actually a burden.
The problems we found in spreadsheets were mostly in three categories:
- Collaboration and security: spreadsheets are highly susceptible to human error, difficult to collaborate on, and scale poorly.
- Obstructive to regulatory compliance: Given how susceptible they are to fraud and human error, it should come as no surprise there are many regulations that impact spreadsheet systems.
- Automation: spreadsheets are dumb. they can’t discover your applications, or project recurring subscriptions, or discover shadow-IT, etc.
Where we are today
No one thinks about SaaS operations when starting a business. We simply don’t have time. The priorities are in designing the business, building the product, testing hypotheses, and keeping the team from going hungry. But (as we have learnt the hard way) eventually, as we grow, so does our SaaS stack, and shadow-IT continues eating away at our resources- security vulnerabilities creep up on us- onboarding and offboarding talent becomes more and more time consuming- until we eventually pay thousands of dollars to platforms that will help us contain it. Multi-million dollar companies like ToriiHQ and Blissfully monetize off of this by charging thousands of dollars per year to medium-sized businesses who did not contain SaaS sprawl.
The problem is so present, that companies like Zylo are highly successful by only focusing on optimizing license spending and renewal management. ToriiHQ, Blissfully, Intello, Rippling, BetterCloud, CleanShelf, G2 Track- they all try to solve the same problem for large companies that did not know better.
Clearly something needs to be done, and it starts by changing the way we work with SaaS. Modern businesses can no longer treat SaaS as some sort of afterthought or expense to let sprawl and roam free. SaaS needs to be the largest asset of modern businesses.
We need to work smarter. We need a platform that unifies all of the concerns that come with leveraging SaaS to accelerate operations and build highly successful businesses. We need software to manage our software. This is why we are building Stackshine.
Originally published at https://www.stackshine.io.
