SaaS Wrappers

The future is going to be software based on existing frameworks.

Usually, if someone is to build a product, they’re building base infrastructure. Why? It was previously exponentially easier to sell enterprise SaaS than it was to sell consumer productivity SaaS. But while enterprise SaaS is still the defacto go-to, it’s a lot easier to make money in consumer SaaS.

My thesis is that there’s a new niche emerging — semi-independent productivity SaaS built up on top of existing legacy software. Some companies already do this — the prime examples being Superhuman (acting as a layer on top of Gmail/ Outlook), and Vimcal (on GCal).

The beauty of these wrappers is that they are effectively building enterprise software for individuals. Because of their specialized niche (and extreme utility) for people in that niche, they can justify high ticket prices but with the bonus of acquiring consumers the way you’d do with Consumer SaaS without having to go through long enterprise sales cycles.

Opinionated software is this general bucket of software which is designed with a specific use case and ideology in mind and while you can use the software without it, you’re only able to access a fraction of the functionality which they have. Think of Obsidian or Roam Research, both of these note-taking platforms can be used without using bidirectional linking but the entire platform was designed around the idea of bidirectional linking so using the platform without it would be futile. The biggest downside to having an opinionated app is that you effectively throttle your user base to a massive subset of the people who (in this example) use a note-taking app. The way most SaaS platforms think about this is that since someone is using their opinionated tool, there’s a higher probability that they’re gaining a considerably larger amount of utility out of it rather than another note-taking platform and thus, can afford to charge you a bit more. Most of the specialized opinionated productivity SaaS these days costs in the range of $15 to $30/mo.

This also comes with the added advantage that you’re letting existing SOPs stay in place, if these wrappers didn’t exist, you would be left with some very undesirable options — (if a small company/ team or someplace you have leverage) go through the pain of uprooting the entire team of a product and onto a new one or just suck it up and continue to use a shitty experience). In most cases, the product which the team is using is a legacy product and has been around for a minute, so getting the entire team to move off Jira, however appealing it sounds, is next to impossible.

The other thing which comes hand in hand with this is that it doesn’t break collaboration. While I hate Google Docs, one of the biggest (and only) reasons I find myself using it is because I’m working with people who’re already accustomed to the platform and switching them all over is either not possible or is going to cause too much pain. Legacy software has a high amount of dependency on its side.

(This piece stemmed from a conversation with a founder building ITAR-controlled technologies)