Dan Martell - January 30, 2023


What Is SaaS？ (Explained in 5 Minutes)

Hosted by
Dan Martell
My cold plunge Every entrepreneur should ask themselves this 🤔

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

176.12

Word count

1,263

Sentence count

42


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a new technology that's been around for a few years now. In this episode, learn about what it is, why it's important, and why you should be using it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 What is SaaS? Software as a service. I'm going to take five minutes to break it down,
00:00:05.840 make it super simple for you so that you can finally understand all these people talking
00:00:10.900 about SaaS, SaaS, SaaS. Why is it so much fun and why does it matter for you? I've been actually
00:00:16.280 building software companies for 25 years. I started off writing code way before we called
00:00:23.020 it SaaS. It was called essentially the internet and we were building applications on top of the
00:00:27.360 internet. And since then, I've personally built five companies. I've exited three. Two of them
00:00:33.200 were venture backed out of Silicon Valley. I've invested in 50 plus and I've helped literally
00:00:38.720 thousands of software CEOs start, grow and exit their software company. But I want to teach it
00:00:46.700 for you so that you understand when other people are like, yeah, I think we should work on this
00:00:50.480 idea. You can understand what it is and what it's not and help you explain it to other people.
00:00:55.720 so let's get into it. Number one is its subscription base. It means that you pay
00:01:02.560 every month to get access to the technology. Think about all the tools. Maybe you pay for
00:01:08.020 iTunes or Spotify or Netflix. These are consumer versions of subscriptions, but in the business
00:01:18.100 world, B2B, these are the tools that all the businesses use to run their company. It's the
00:01:24.280 accounting software. It's the merchant account. It's the project management software, the
00:01:29.000 spreadsheet software, the workflow tools, the email marketing tools. All of these are things
00:01:34.380 that people, businesses pay for these applications every month on a subscription basis. Number two
00:01:42.000 is that it's hosted remotely. Now I know for some of you guys, you're like, what do you mean it's
00:01:46.440 hosted remotely? Where else would it be hosted? When I first started writing software back in the
00:01:51.740 day back in my day I used to spend a lot of time in server rooms because the way software was
00:01:57.360 deployed was literally on CDs and you would take those CDs and you'd go into the server room and
00:02:04.280 you'd freeze your bum off because the computers run better and it's more efficient and you would
00:02:08.280 just like load all the software onto these computers and then people would usually access
00:02:14.480 the software through other terminal clients or other software on their computer through
00:02:19.840 the network. It wasn't hosted remotely up in the cloud, right? Which is what a lot of people do
00:02:27.740 today is that it is not installed on your servers. It's installed in the company servers. And it's
00:02:32.920 usually right now installed on Amazon. And that way it doesn't require a major investment in
00:02:38.500 hardware for you to buy software, to deploy it, to use it. Number three is that it's accessible
00:02:44.220 through the internet. Now I know some of you guys are like, well, how else would you access it?
00:02:48.920 Truth was, is back in the day,
00:02:51.060 you would access the software through the local network.
00:02:54.780 It was abnormal for a business to host their information
00:02:57.600 on somebody else's servers.
00:03:00.040 It wasn't until this cool company called Salesforce
00:03:02.440 that came along and with their marketing
00:03:05.260 and tens of millions of dollars of spend,
00:03:09.100 convinced the business community that it is safe
00:03:13.020 and okay for you to upload
00:03:16.140 your sensitive customer information
00:03:18.280 to their system and allow your team to access it
00:03:23.400 through the internet, through a traditional login,
00:03:27.200 a username and password.
00:03:29.280 Prior to that, there was VPNs required
00:03:31.400 and deep security and all these other things.
00:03:33.740 And it was just a no-go for businesses
00:03:37.420 to trust their proprietary customer data
00:03:41.220 on somebody else's system.
00:03:42.860 And now this is how we do it.
00:03:44.860 Pretty much every one of the SaaS tools out there,
00:03:47.800 You just log in using a username and password
00:03:50.760 and you're good to go.
00:03:52.140 Number four is it's scalable.
00:03:54.780 Here's why I love this one.
00:03:56.860 Scalable means that it doesn't matter
00:03:59.400 if you start off with one account and it's just you
00:04:02.260 and you're using this software as a service
00:04:04.240 or you have 10,000 team members that decide,
00:04:09.040 you know what, we're gonna move everything
00:04:11.360 from email over to Slack, right?
00:04:14.560 Or whatever it is.
00:04:15.440 You're gonna move all your project management
00:04:16.940 from one software to this other software and you can literally just invite everybody through a link
00:04:22.780 and they all register and they start using this new product all sas companies have an auto scalable
00:04:29.820 feature that it doesn't matter if you're one or ten thousand it will spin up the servers it will
00:04:35.740 spin up the databases it will spin up the back end infrastructure so that it can keep up to the
00:04:41.740 demand and that makes it powerful because prior to sas you'd have to go and buy a physical server
00:04:48.940 go install the software add it to the network and try to configure it for it to be load balanced now
00:04:54.860 you think of none of that you just send invites to your team to use the product and you don't
00:05:00.060 even think twice that it's going to be available or fast once they sign up number five is regular
00:05:06.940 updates this is probably the coolest part that a lot of people take for granted sas is neat because
00:05:13.260 the code is managed on somebody else's server and when there's updates to the code you don't have to
00:05:19.740 do anything it literally new versions just happen to get released or you log in and there's a little
00:05:25.500 notification window that says like alert new software update and it tells you about the two
00:05:30.060 or three new features and you're like very cool take a tour or accept the changes or whatever
00:05:35.180 and then the software just gets better prior to it being hosted and being software as a service
00:05:41.420 you used to have to get the update on cd and then literally spend more time freezing your bum off
00:05:47.100 in a server room and updating the code and then letting everybody know how all those changes were
00:05:52.940 going to affect their workflow so that they didn't get lost in their ability to keep doing their work
00:05:58.620 at their computer and it was just this big process of change management with sas the software just
00:06:03.580 gets updated it gets better it's clearly communicated you don't have to worry about cds
00:06:09.740 and updates and all this stuff the companies take care of it so that like as the years progress you
00:06:15.740 keep paying the same amount of money every month yet the developers keep making the code better
00:06:21.100 so that it's actually an incredible deal because you get new innovation and new updates and new
00:06:27.580 capabilities that you didn't have to pay for and it's just part of the subscription
00:06:31.500 so there you go a five minute breakdown of what is software as a service sas it makes it easy for
00:06:38.540 businesses to pay monthly hosted in the cloud get updates without having to deal with anything
00:06:44.460 themselves it's scalable that's what it's about and it's a powerful way for you not only to build
00:06:50.700 software but also consume it so that you don't have to spend a ton of money up front and get
00:06:55.340 very powerful tools and workflows to help you in your life.
00:07:00.280 If you like this video,
00:07:01.120 be sure to check out other videos I've done on SaaS,
00:07:03.600 on writing code, on building companies, et cetera.
00:07:06.720 They're all available for you.
00:07:08.220 I hope this finds you awesome and I'll see you next week.