@doantrang You raise a good point. I have been told that I should have made a SAAS to sell to existing businesses in this industry. But that sounded a little boring to me honestly, so instead I just created a business that uses the SAAS that I developed and I have been scaling up and taking market share ever since.
It is much more defensible (at least in my opinion) to build a …let’s call it “traditional” business instead of building a SAAS and trying to sell the SAAS. Once a SAAS is public, it is quite easy to duplicate the features and functionality. Competition then becomes an issue and you need to raise funding very quicky to stay ahead. A pure SAAS business is not very bootstrap friendly. On the other hand, It is much more difficult to replicate a business that is using its own private proprietary technology, and so such a business is ideal for solofunded solofounders, though much more difficult to build.
People have actually built SAAS for this industry over the years, which many of the competitors still use, but it’s just not built with the level of laser focus and customization that I built my product with. My intuition tells me there will never be a commercially viable product similar to my SAAS, but I need to further reflect on why I believe that is the case.
In a lot of ways, the competitors don’t really know what their actual business friction points are, and so they are all satisfied with the current state of the SAAS products they use. My SAAS takes everything about 100x deeper than any existing product on the markets. If the existing SAAS is Lake Tahoe, then my SAAS is Mariana’s trench. It would be very difficult to take it even deeper and drive any meaningful value from it.
I tested out the concept with this small niche, but I’m most excited about expansion to adjacent industries in the future which is where nearly all of my future growth will be after I monopolize this smaller market.