Enterprise SaaS Truisms

Today’s post is short and sweet; I was thinking about opinions I’ve formed about B2B SaaS offerings the last few years (as a builder, as an advisor, and as a user), and I wanted to share out just to see if they’re more widely held, obvious but true, totally counter-intuitive, or perhaps way off-base.

1. 80/20 equilibrium - getting your user base to an 80/20 split between consumers / creators is a good milestone (lots of successful products live at this ratio)

2. configuration is key - no one has an issue with the software itself; their complaints are all about the way it’s implemented

3. shadow IT is real - users have 10x more pull than IT and will go around any policies, rules, constraints that they can; enforcement is futile

4. usage begets sprawl - the more you use it, the worse the experience gets, because power usage creates clutter, which hinders novice user adoption

5. admin is not a JTBD - no user knows their admin, no admin knows they are an admin, and the SaaS vendor thinks the admin has no other jobs to do

6. change management is a barrier - it follows a step function, with limited adoption in fits and spurts, then hits a tipping point (or plateaus)

7. ship dates are arbitrary - how much a company cares about a release date is inversely proportional to how much the customer / user cares

8. inbox is the end goal - wild success is being yet another inbox (email, chat, etc) and requires building all those features (search, notifications, snooze, archive)

9. “fit” changes the status quo - product/market fit, market/motion fit, etc can only be achieved by either reducing effort via product (to meet user ability) OR increasing enablement via GTM (to meet market maturity)

10. 80/20 paradox - the majority of customers use a minority of features, but stickiness requires deeper implementation / engagement / integration

I’d love to hear other truisms from readers - please chime in via comments👇. And if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing.

update:

thanks to readers for these additional truisms

• "market to the buyer, build for the user"

• "optimize for frequency of use vs. time spent using"

• “there are features that are used and features that are bought”

---

further reading / references

• Skip Step SaaS was my last attempt to explain some common patterns that you can leverage when bootstrapping your product

• I’ve talked about the challenges of change management before in an audio episode (New Toolkit, Old Mindset)

• a long read on how to build an enterprise SaaS company on a series of loops

• if you liked this list of observations, I’ve got another set of takeaways on how to tackle enterprise software with a consumer flair

---

childish drawing / interpretation