In 2020, where are the opportunities for new SaaS offerings?
The enterprise market is teeming with capable incumbents. This includes several dozen public SaaS & enterprise software leaders as well as hundreds of unicorns & minicorns which will continue to expand their scope. The enterprise SaaS market is still in its early days. Of the ~$3.8T total IT spend, just ~5% is on SaaS. That number has a lot of head room, and there is a long way to go. The willingness of businesses to adopt cloud software is higher than ever.
Here are some areas we are seeing high-potential startups in:
Intelligent Software: Re-architecting mature offerings for newer paradigms such as data/ML-first is hard. => Opportunities abound for new entrants that leverage data natively and re-invent workflows across business functions (sales, marketing, HR, customer service, operations..) and industry verticals (transportation, logistics, manufacturing, retail, financial services…). We are 3–4 years into the current era & continue to see many opportunities across the spectrum
The Middle: Successful SaaS products move up-market as they add features and raise ACVs. As a result, mid-market and SMB customers continue to be underserved in many segments and verticals. Deliver high value at the right price (and with the right GTM model) => a huge set of opportunities
Meta SaaS and SaaS for SaaS: With the increasing multiplicity of SaaS tools across the stack, businesses need tools to manage provisioning, access control, data, & costs. SaaS companies themselves need specialized products for functions such as prospecting, customer success, experience management, metrics management and financial planning
Smarter, Narrower BI: Intelligent products that help cut through the clutter, given the proliferation of a variety of tools and multiple dashboards. We are seeing a new wave of “insights” products that are intelligent, deep and narrow within specific functional areas such as sales, marketing, BI, finance et al
Data Privacy and Management: As the focus on data privacy rises with recent legislation and public discourse, there are many opportunities to help enterprises better manage data and provide their end-users more control
The Under-Digitized: There are still many under-digitized industry segments & functions that can benefit from the right software. There is usually a reason why a segment is currently under-digitized, so market timing is key here
This is just a shortlist in no particular order. There is way more going on in the world of enterprise/SaaS. Please feel free to add other areas in the comments.