Dan Martell - January 30, 2023


What Is SaaS？ (Explained in 5 Minutes)


Episode Stats

Length

7 minutes

Words per Minute

176.11787

Word Count

1,263

Sentence Count

42


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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.