note-taking apps
There are a growing number of SaaS apps for taking notes on your phone and viewing them later on your desktop.
Along with free Google Keep, Apple Notes and Microsoft OneNote, Notion, Obsidian, Liner and Memex are in demand.
Bear adds automatic categorization and Markdown support to note taking.
Roam Research – follows the concept of “network thinking”, linking the notes in meaning.
Cross-platform organization tools
The spread of corporate data across different platforms hinders the growth of companies due to the lack of quick access to the necessary information. Many SaaS projects are aimed at solving this problem.
Document management systems give employees access to documents located on different cloud platforms and the ability to collaborate.
- ExpanDrive – helps to organize cloud storage of documents and quick access to them by users from the desktop.
- Digital asset management solutions help store and quickly find visual information.
- Lingo – offers the opportunity to create a corporate library of layouts, photographic materials, graphic files.
- Login management – single sign-on (SSO) software and password managers help users not waste time recovering passwords.
- LastPass is one of the popular login management systems used by 25 million users and 70,000 companies. Its competitors are 1Password, Dashlane, OneLogin, KeePass.
Security
As the availability of SaaS grows, the number of users, applications and connections between them grows, the requirements for the security of user information grow. Companies need to ensure that security keeps up with its growth.
KnowBe4 is one of the leading security platforms that allows companies to assess, monitor and mitigate the threat of cyber attacks.
Keeper is a secure password and digital vault management application for organizations and individuals.
A large number of SaaS security companies can be expected to enter the market.
We hope that this review was useful for you: it gave you new ideas or tools. If, in your opinion, I missed something, missed an obvious trend, or am mistaken in something, write about it in the comments.
Pricing for SaaS products. Where to begin?
Why is it important to constantly experiment with price? In any business, you create some value and exchange it for money. But price does not live in a vacuum. Everything from sales and marketing to products and finance is what a business needs to push people to buy a product at your price. Dozens of aspects affect the price of a product and customer acquisition, and it is important to consider them when building a monetization strategy.
The Epic Growth team translated an article by Patrick Campbell (CEO ProfitWell) about a monetization strategy for SaaS products. We deal with the value metric and proxy metrics, the influence of the target audience on pricing and the importance of experiments.
Where to begin
The pricing policy in any business should be tied to the value of the product. Everything that affects the value of a product is reflected in its cost and final profit.
The specific price figure is not so important. It is enough to define the price segment: is it a product for $10, $100 or $1000? Discussing, setting a price of $500 or $505 is a waste of time.
Start with two parameters: the value metric and the portrait of the target audience. This is the basis of monetization and pricing strategy.
Step 1. Define the value metric
A value metric is what you charge for. For example, for access to content for a certain period (as we have in the Epic Growth Premium subscription), a transaction, the number of visits. You can make mistakes with other pricing parameters, but if the value metric is defined correctly, you are already on the right track.
Value-based pricing allows you to get different profits from large and small customers. If you charge the same fixed fee to all your customers, you are missing out on an opportunity to generate more revenue. The value metric allows you to practically not limit price categories and increase potential profits.
You can also change the price depending on how much value the customer receives. If more, he pays more, your income grows. If it is less, it pays less, and churn decreases. This is why companies that use the value metric typically grow twice as fast, have half the % churn, and earn twice as much revenue compared to companies that charge a flat fee.
To define a value metric, think about exactly what value you are giving to the user of your product. In B2B, it can be saving money, increasing income, saving time. In B2C, the joy of using the product, the physical fitness achieved, the increased efficiency, etc. Sometimes this value is easy to measure, but more often you will have to look for proxy metrics.
An example of a product with a clear value metric is the MainStreet service, which processes documents for tax benefits. The user pays a percentage of the funds saved on taxes.
An example where a metric is difficult to objectively evaluate is HubSpot. The value of HubSpot is the revenue generated by the business through the platform. But it is impossible to measure it, so the proxy value metric in this case will be contacts, visits, new users, etc. If the service took an equal payment at the rate from each account, it would not receive more profit from large customers than from small ones.
To find the right proxy metric, find 5-10 proxies first and then talk to your clients. This way you will determine 1-2 of them that are most preferred by your target customers. Make sure these metrics also make sense to you in terms of growth and retention.
Examples of proxy metrics:
– The comedy show in Barcelona charges for the number of chuckles: each costs 0.3€.
Zapier invented the concept of zap (software connection) and charges based on connection time.
– Slack offers rates for a different number of users