PaaS: SaaS Companies, You Have an Unprecedented Opportunity

The current market is full of really interesting SaaS companies that have built up at least $100M in annual revenue run rate (ARR). Some have gone public. Some are waiting in the wings. There are also many more that are in the $50M to $100M ARR range.

They serve different segments. Some serve verticals. Some horizontal enterprise functions. Some large niches. Some enterprises. Some mid-market. Some SME.

Together, the SaaS market is a healthy, robust, exciting cauldron of innovation.

Unlike Social Media, Search or e-Commerce, SaaS is not an oligopoly. [ref: An Oligopoly, After All This?]

And these SaaS companies that have achieved critical mass in their own segments now have an unprecedented opportunity of scaling to become much larger businesses by broadening their footprints.

They can look within, and look outside to identify the growth levers.

Let me explain.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Evident.io CEO Tim Prendergast (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of customers are particularly resonating with your value proposition?

Tim Prendergast: The unique thing about us is, coming from being practitioners first, we are able to understand the problems that anyone going to use the cloud is going to have. In fact, the beauty of a standardized API platform like an Amazon or Azure is that whether you’re a two-person startup or you’re a company with 20,000 engineers, >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Evident.io CEO Tim Prendergast (Part 1)

Tim discusses cloud security challenges in this short conversation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Evident.io.

Tim Prendergast: I’m a long-time information security practitioner and one of the early cloud computing adopters. My history goes way back to the early days of PGP encryption and more recently before I started Evident.io, I was one of the principal architects of Adobe.

My focus was on the cloud computing side of the house and transforming that company from someone who had user experiences >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you learn about the target customer segment? You said you started catering to tech startups. Where was the business coming from as you grew? What were you learning about customer acquisition?

Isaac Oates: There are some really big things that we learned. One is that it’s really hard to control when someone switches a product like this. Every company has some solution. You can’t exist without it. It’s very sticky and people don’t want to switch. We went into it thinking, “We’re going to smile and dial and then we’ll convince them that our stuff is great.” The reality is it’s a long play.

In many cases, a company will think about switching but it just won’t be worth the hassle. We realized that we had much less >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Who were you dialing? What was the process of targeting and positioning?

Isaac Oates: I always think about what I would do differently, I would say that we probably brought on a sales team a little bit later than we could have. We had a website and people could come in and sign up. We had a database of hundreds of companies in New York who had heard of us one way or another. Those were the people we started calling. Once we exhausted that, we looked at what we were succeeding with.

The companies we were succeeding with were small tech startups. They’re early adopters. It always resonated with them. The size >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground?

Isaac Oates: I got a lot of help initially. It was pretty easy and there was a lot of luck involved. When I was at Etsy, one of the members of their Board was an investor. I know Danny who’s on Etsy’s Board. I told him that I would start a new company. He was like, “Great. You should come talk to us at Index.” A couple of weeks later, we had money in the bank from there. I also raised some money from my co-founders at my last company.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise as your first round of funding? You’re raising money on a concept? >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you have to stay at Etsy?

Isaac Oates: I was there for three years. It was pretty crazy actually. While I was there, I kept thinking about my time at Adtuitive. There were three founders and I was the one doing all of the paperwork, payroll, and insurance. I spent a lot of time with our fax machine.

I thought, “There’s got to be a way to use a computer to do all these things.” While I was at Etsy, I started to think about what I would do after Etsy. I kept coming back over and over again to this problem. Everybody that I talked to was petrified of >>>

Building a Fast-growth SaaS HR Technology Company: Justworks CEO Isaac Oates (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Justworks is a fast-growth VC-funded startup in New York in the Human Capital Management space, catering to small businesses.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Isaac Oates: I grew up in New Jersey. I was actually born in California and moved around a lot with my mom. I grew up with a single mom. We moved around the country as she went to different jobs, but I spent most of my childhood in central New Jersey >>>