How Can A SaaS Startup Survive In A Crowded Market?

In an environment where every software category on G2 is overflowing with well-funded and highly rated platforms, this question gets asked again and again:

How Can A SaaS Startup Survive In A Crowded Market?        

Find a?segment?of the market to win in.?

Where you can build a 10x feature, and then a 10x solution, that solves a niche problem that customers will pay for.

Most SaaS markets are crowded today.

But the thing is:

• As Bigger SaaS companies cross $100m in ARR, and then $1B in ARR, they stop focusing on smaller niches.?They might give up on SMBs, or freemium, or higher churn segments. But you might be able to do well there.
• Many Bigger Cos aren’t vertical-specific. There can be room for a vendor focused just on e-commerce, or healthcare, or contact centers, or other large markets. For example, Mailchimp is very strong in general email but Klaviyyo is worth $4B doing email for e-commerce.
• Most Bigger Cos are 10+ years old. Do something important they don’t do well.?Maybe they don’t integrate with newer vendors. Maybe they don’t do mobile as well, or social as well, or whatever. 10+ year old platforms are powerful. But they were architected for a different age.

Another way to look at it is any vendor sort of has to ignore any market segment that is less than 10% of their revenues. It’s just immaterial.

And as so many SaaS leaders now have crossed $1B+ in ARR, from Zendesk to Hubspot to Shopify to Twilio and more … that leaves a $100m+ of customers for each of them … they just aren’t that focused on.

A bit more here: Ways To Enter A Crowded SaaS Market

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