Software Startup Ideas in 2024 | SaaS

Summary

In this insightful video, the speaker discusses the two primary methods for starting a business: addressing an urgent problem or capitalizing on a significant macro trend like AI. The focus is on how to leverage the AI platform shift by understanding past trends and applying three key principles. The speaker shares five core SaaS platforms (CRM, ERP, CMS, HCM, and BI) that are ripe for disruption and offers strategies for creating value through predictions, automation, and intelligent agents. The goal is to either expand within the SaaS ecosystem or be acquired by established players, ultimately building a successful SaaS business.

Takeaways

• 🚀 Two primary ways to start a business: solving an urgent problem or tapping into a major macro trend like A.I.
• 📈 Understanding platform shifts, such as the move from desktop to cloud and the rise of mobile, is crucial for leveraging A.I. in SaaS.
• 🔍 Identifying the big trend, like A.I., and learning from past platform shifts can guide entrepreneurs on how to capitalize on current opportunities.
• 💡 The five core SaaS platforms are CRM, ERP, CMS, HCM, and BI, each with significant market value and potential for disruption.
• 🛠️ During platform shifts, incumbents often struggle to adapt, providing opportunities for startups to innovate and capture market share.
• 📊 The shift to cloud and mobile has shown that startups can succeed by offering a better experience or addressing new needs.
• 📈 A land-and-expand strategy allows startups to add value to existing platforms and gradually increase their market presence.
• 🤖 A.I. can be integrated into existing SaaS platforms to enhance features, automate processes, or create autonomous agents.
• 🔄 Platform shifts often lead to acquisitions by established players, offering exit opportunities for innovative startups.
• 📚 Engaging in customer conversations and building a great product are essential for success in the SaaS industry.
• 📖 Utilizing resources like the five-point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide can help founders navigate the complexities of starting and growing a SaaS business.

Q & A

What are the two ways to start a business mentioned in the transcript?

The first way is to solve a burning, urgent, and important problem that you and people you know are experiencing. The second way is to tap into a massive macro trend, such as SaaS, and build a business around it.

What is the big trend in SaaS that the speaker believes is crucial to understand?

The big trend in SaaS is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), and understanding how platform shifts like A.I. play out is essential.

What are the five core SaaS platforms that the speaker identifies as having the most lucrative potential?

The five core SaaS platforms are CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CMS (Content Management Systems), HCM (Human Capital Management), and Business Intelligence platforms.

How did the platform shift from desktop software to cloud-based applications impact SaaS businesses?

The shift allowed SaaS businesses to offer their services on a subscription basis, eliminating the need for upfront license payments and providing automatic updates and feature additions, which was a significant transformation in the industry.

What is the 'land and expand' strategy mentioned in the transcript?

The 'land and expand' strategy involves starting with a single feature or set of features that provide ten times the value of the native platform, attracting users, and then gradually expanding the product's functionality to capture more market share.

What are the three value-add approaches to existing SaaS platforms that the speaker suggests leveraging during a platform shift?

The three value-add approaches are making predictions based on data, automating workflows to streamline processes, and creating autonomous agents that can perform tasks traditionally done by humans.

How does the speaker suggest taking advantage of the A.I. platform shift in SaaS?

The speaker suggests building a system of intelligence that pulls data from existing platforms, incorporates AI models, and generates new value through predictions, automation, or autonomous agents.

What is the potential exit strategy for SaaS startups during a platform shift?

The potential exit strategy is for well-established players to acquire startups that have successfully adapted to the platform shift and are providing better experiences or products, allowing the acquirer to maintain competitiveness.

What is the importance of customer conversations for SaaS founders according to the speaker?

Customer conversations are crucial for validating the market and understanding the needs and problems that the SaaS product should address, which is a key step in building a successful SaaS business.

What resource does the speaker offer to help SaaS founders grow their businesses?

The speaker offers a free 'Five Point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide' that provides actionable strategies and tactics for building, growing, and scaling SaaS businesses.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 Starting a Business in the Age of A.I.

This paragraph introduces two approaches to starting a business: solving an urgent problem or tapping into a major trend like SaaS. It emphasizes the importance of understanding platform shifts, particularly the impact of A.I., and how to leverage them. The speaker, TK, shares his experience with the transition from desktop software to cloud-based applications and outlines the three principles necessary to capitalize on the current A.I. platform shift. He also promises to reveal five innovative SaaS ideas that align with this shift.

05:00

📈 Understanding Platform Shifts in SaaS

The second paragraph delves into the concept of platform shifts, using the transition from physical media to cloud services as an example. It highlights the challenges faced by established companies like Salesforce and Oracle during these shifts and the opportunities they presented for startups. The speaker discusses the importance of learning from past shifts to navigate the current A.I. shift and suggests that the same core SaaS platforms (CRM, ERP, CMS, HCM, and BI) are being reinvented and disrupted once again.

10:03

🤖 Leveraging A.I. in SaaS: Strategy and Execution

This paragraph outlines the third principle of taking advantage of the A.I. platform shift. It suggests that instead of building a complete CRM or ERP system, entrepreneurs should focus on creating a system of intelligence that enhances existing platforms. The speaker proposes three value-add strategies: predictions, automation, and the development of autonomous agents. These strategies aim to improve specific aspects of existing SaaS platforms, allowing new companies to enter the market and expand their offerings over time.

15:04

💡 Opportunities in the A.I. Platform Shift

The fourth paragraph discusses the potential opportunities for SaaS startups during platform shifts, such as the development of agents that could replace human salespeople. It also explores the possibility of established companies acquiring innovative startups to stay competitive. The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding the historical patterns of platform shifts to successfully navigate the current A.I. trend and suggests that startups can either aim for growth through a land-and-expand strategy or consider an exit strategy by being acquired by larger players.

20:04

📚 Navigating the A.I. Shift: A Call to Action

In the final paragraph, the speaker recaps the key points discussed in the video, including the five core SaaS platforms, the historical platform shifts, and the strategies for leveraging the A.I. shift. He encourages viewers to engage in customer conversations and build great products. The speaker also promotes his five-point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide, offering it as a resource for founders to accelerate their business growth and take advantage of the platform shift. He ends with a call to action for viewers to subscribe to his channel for more strategies and tactics.

Keywords

💡Platform Shift

A platform shift refers to a significant change in the underlying technology or business model that redefines how products or services are delivered. In the video, it is illustrated by the transition from desktop software to cloud-based services and the subsequent move to mobile applications. The current platform shift is towards AI, which is expected to disrupt existing SaaS platforms.

💡SaaS (Software as a Service)

SaaS is a software distribution model in which a third-party provider hosts applications and makes them available to customers over the Internet. The video discusses the growth and evolution of SaaS, particularly in the context of the five core platforms: CRM, ERP, CMS, HCM, and BI. The speaker emphasizes the opportunities for new SaaS businesses to emerge during platform shifts.

💡CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM is a strategy for managing a company's interactions with current and potential customers. The video highlights CRM as one of the five core SaaS platforms, with a market size of $76 billion. It suggests that even within this large market, there is room for niche CRM solutions or those that leverage AI to offer improved functionality.

💡ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)

ERP systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, facilitating operations and better decision-making. The video positions ERP as a $54 billion market, indicating that it is ripe for disruption and innovation, especially with the advent of AI-driven solutions.

💡AI (Artificial Intelligence)

AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions. The video emphasizes AI as the driving force behind the current platform shift in SaaS, suggesting that AI can enhance existing SaaS platforms by providing predictive analytics, automation, and intelligent agents.

💡Land and Expand Model

This business strategy involves entering a market with a single product or service, gaining a foothold (landing), and then expanding the product or service offering to capture more market share. The video suggests using this model to start with a single feature that is significantly better than existing solutions and then expanding from there, leveraging the platform shift to grow the business.

💡Value Addition

Value addition refers to the process of enhancing a product or service to make it more valuable to the customer. In the context of the video, it is suggested that new SaaS companies can add value to existing platforms by integrating AI to provide better predictions, automate tasks, or create intelligent agents, thus improving the functionality and user experience.

💡Exit Strategy

An exit strategy in a business context refers to a plan for how a founder or investor will divest from a company, often through acquisition or public offering. The video discusses the possibility of SaaS startups being acquired by larger, established companies during platform shifts, as these larger companies seek to integrate innovative solutions into their offerings.

💡Systems of Intelligence

Systems of intelligence are AI-driven platforms that integrate data from various sources to generate new insights and automate processes. The video suggests building such systems by leveraging existing SaaS platforms' data, adding AI capabilities, and focusing on specific areas of improvement to take advantage of the AI platform shift.

💡Monetization

Monetization refers to the process of converting a product, service, or asset into income. In the video, the speaker discusses how new SaaS companies can monetize their AI-driven features by offering predictions, automation, or intelligent agents as value-added services to existing SaaS platforms.

Highlights

There are two primary ways to start a business: solving an urgent problem or tapping into a macro trend like A.I.

A.I. is a significant platform shift, but understanding how to leverage it is crucial.

Three principles are essential for taking advantage of the A.I. platform shift.

Five core SaaS platforms (CRM, ERP, CMS, HCM, BI) are repeatedly disrupted and reinvented during platform shifts.

The transition from desktop software to cloud applications was a major platform shift.

Salesforce capitalized on the cloud shift by being the first Cloud CRM company.

Mobile was the next platform shift, requiring companies to adapt their SaaS offerings for mobile devices.

In the absence of a new platform shift, SaaS businesses niched down to compete.

A.I. is the current platform shift, and it's expected to disrupt existing SaaS platforms even more than previous shifts.

To succeed in the A.I. shift, focus on adding significant value to existing platforms rather than rebuilding everything from scratch.

Creating a system of intelligence that leverages data from existing platforms and A.I. models can be a strategic approach.

Value-add products can include predictions, automation, and autonomous agents.

The land and expand strategy is effective, where you start with a single feature and then grow your offering.

Existing players may acquire startups that offer better solutions during platform shifts.

The SaaS industry is special because of its ability to generate new value during platform shifts.

The five core SaaS platforms have been disrupted and reinvented over the last 20 years.

The best way to start is by building a system of intelligence that adds value to existing platforms.

Transcripts

There are two ways to start a business.

The first way is to solve a burning, urgent, important problem

that you have that you are experiencing and people that you know are experiencing.

The other way is to tap into a massive macro trend that's happening in SaaS

and just writing it. Here's a big question, though.

What is the big trend?

Well, you and I both know it's A.I., but the real question is

how did these platform shifts platform shift like A.I.?

did they play out in the past,

and how would you actually go about taking advantage of this platform shift?

In this episode,

I'm going to walk you through the three principles that you absolutely need

to know on how to take advantage of this platform shift.

And I'm going to share with you five Monster SaaSs ideas

that are going to be incredible companies as part of this platform shift.

It is my hope that you will run with one of these ideas

or using these principles and using these ideas.

You'll be able to iterate on the SaaS idea and SaaS product

you are already working on take advantage of this platform shift.

when you follow these principles and you run with one of these ideas,

you will be able to build an incredible SaaS business.

Intro

everybody.

Welcome to Unstoppable.

I'm TK, and on this channel I help SaaS founders like you grow

your size businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy.

Now, if you're new to this channel, welcome.

I drop an episode every single Sunday with actionable strategies and tactics

from the trenches on how to build, grow and scale SaaS businesses.

So if you knew.

Be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon.

That way you'll get notified.

Every single time I drop an episode with the TC Energy.

if you already part of this community,

if you're part of my SaaS, go to market coaching programs or people.

Welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here.

I remember my first SaaS business.

No, this is not

how out there was one right before that and it was in the web 2.0 era.

We were just starting out and the big platform shift

that was happening back then was people were moving from desktop computers

and desktop software where you install it with a CD

or deployed it in your own data center to the cloud.

And Web 2.0 was the point where web based applications

were actually better than the desktop software that you used to use.

It was snappier, it was faster, it was responsive.

It was really, really cool.

And during that stage,

I saw a number of things happen in terms of that platform shift.

Now, as you look back over the last 15 years and SaaS,

my 15 years in SaaS, I've seen a number of partnerships happen

and in each of one of those cases the same core SaaS platforms

got disrupted and upload as part of this platform shift.

So in this episode I'm

going to walk you through exactly what those five core ideas are

and the principles that I'm applying

to actually take advantage of this big shift happening with it.

So if you're excited, dig in

and smash a like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it.

so everyone sweats about all kinds of long tail SaaS ideas and those are great.

But let me introduce you to the five core SaaS platforms that exist today.

The first one is CRM and CRM is roughly

a $76 billion market, which is why you can start another CRM today

and you get targeted towards gas stations or spas

and you could still turn into a large enough market.

The second type of SaaS platform are ERP platforms.

ERP platforms are short for enterprise resource planning

and these are essentially and this is essentially a $54 billion market.

the third kind of SaaS platforms that exist are CMS platforms,

and CMS platforms are roughly a $24 billion market.

the fourth kind are HCM platforms.

This is the kind of stuff that H.R.

uses, and this is estimated at roughly $26 billion.

And finally, the last one,

which I'm sure you've heard of, are business intelligence platforms.

And these are valued at 32 billion, and this is all U.S.

dollars. Why did I start with this?

Well, here's the thing that happened over and over with every platform shift.

These core ideas, a CRM platform and ERP platform, a CMS platform,

an HCM platform and a BI platform, kept getting reinvented and kept

getting disrupted through every single platform shift that's happened.

the same is going to happen with the AI.

Now I'm going to explain to you exactly how these platform shifts happen

and how you can take advantage of it and how you can run with these ideas.

And when you stick around to principle number three,

I'll teach you how to actually build a SaaS product today

without having to build an entire CRM platform and still aim

to take advantage of this macro trend.

once you kind of lay out these are the five key pillars of SaaS today.

Now there are long tail platforms.

There are random little tools that get created and those are great ideas.

But at the end of the day, most lucrative businesses in

SaaS today are one of these five platforms.

This is managed by the sales team.

This is managed by the back end of the company.

This is managed by mostly the marketing team.

This is the h.r.

And this is pretty much spanning across the entire company.

And each of these are so large and has multiple players,

which makes it very, very lucrative to go after because there's always room

for niche players, or more importantly, there's always room to actually disrupt

one of these companies. When a platform shift is coming together.

so that's principle number one. Now we're going to build on this.

Principle number two is understanding how

these platform shifts happened over the last 15 to 20 years.

Now, I mentioned this before the first let's pick a color that we like,

but these this one, the first platform shift that happened

was going from CDs to the cloud.

So that was one of the first platform shift that happened,

meaning there were a whole bunch of CRM companies and ERP companies

and CMS companies and CRM companies and business intelligence companies

that used to just ship CDs and used to install it on your desktop

or on your server

in your own data center and used to run it and used to license it.

You didn't even rent it like you do today with the cloud.

one of the first platform shifts that happened was taking all of this

and saying, you know what?

Instead of spending all this money and paying upfront for a license,

why don't just pay us $99 a month and you can just use it in the cloud?

You don't have to install anything

and will automatically update new features will get added.

And that was one of the biggest transformations that happened.

That was one of the first platform shifts that happened.

take a company like Salesforce, incredible company, massive company.

But guess what?

They were not the first CRM company.

They were the first Cloud CRM company.

the crazy thing was when Salesforce first came out and said, Hey,

we're going to put all your customer data on the cloud.

Are you going to trust us with it?

And it's only going to be $19 a month and salespeople can use it.

Everyone thought they were crazy.

In fact, they had the toughest time raising venture capital.

That's how crazy these platform ships are.

It looks stupid, dumb, like a toy, then they end up eating the Giants.

Now, here's the thing.

even though Salesforce was not the first CRM company,

the original CRM company that existed at that time, it was Oracle and Siebel.

They also had to go in to the cloud, so had to compete with Salesforce

and they probably even tried to buy Salesforce, but they did it,

and so they themselves had to disrupt themselves and go into the cloud.

This is an important point and we'll circle

back to this principle number three and why that's important.

But just make a note of that.

Once the cloud happened and everyone started going on the cloud,

the next platform shift that started happen was mobile.

It wasn't just enough to have a really snappy web application

accessing all your data all of a sudden because the iPhone came out

and BlackBerrys went outdated and Android came out.

Everyone wanted to access all these platforms on the go,

then the iPad came out and that doubled it even more.

And at that point, Salesforce, Oracle and all these Giants

had to scramble to actually take advantage of that platform shift.

And here's a crazy thing that happens when platform shifts happen.

Yes, these companies have a ton of resources, but at the end of the day,

innovation is driven by an average product manager in a very large company.

And these folks like to go home at 5 p.m..

They're not like you and me.

They're not startup founders, they're not reinvent visioning

how they can redo CRM or ERP or CMS or HCM API.

They're just like, okay, cool, how do we do this mobile thing?

And a lot of times during these platform shifts,

these big companies, although they may try, they fail again.

Put a note on this because in principle number two

and explain why this is important.

Once the mobile shift happened, basically for a very long time, nothing happened.

SaaS became more and more saturated and more and more competitive

and there were new iterations of the same idea.

There were new CRM companies, there were new ERP companies, CMS companies,

HCM companies, seen by companies, but there wasn't a platform shift.

So it became harder to compete around this stage.

The big thing that started to happen in SaaS is instead of saying, okay,

we are CRM for everybody, people started to niche down.

They said, okay, we can't compete with Salesforce

for being the CRM for everybody, so we'll just be CRM for health care

or we'll just be the CRM for real estate, or we'll just be the CRM for auto

body shops. It goes really, really long tail.

So the reason that happened was

there was no other way to compete, there was no disruption happening.

So they had to get super specific.

And a lot of you may be working on ideas just like that.

Like, look, we're going to build a CMS, a content management system,

a web page system just for real estate agents.

And you can go super niche because there was no platform shift happening.

You had to go niche to really differentiate from these guys.

But in the last couple of years, the next platform shift started to happen

and this guy now we are still in the super early days of A.I..

Chatterjee came out maybe about two years ago.

We're still trying to figure out how to make these large language models faster.

We're still trying to figure out how to protect all the data.

However, it's very clear that every single one of these platforms

just like before, with the move to the cloud

and the move to mobile, are going to get disrupted

and perhaps more disrupted than we ever imagined.

Because here's the crazy thing that happens with all of these platform

shifts the rate of change, complete redoing of how these pieces

of software work accelerates even more because compute becomes higher

and that new technology and the platform that's happening allows for so much more.

And there's been nothing like AI before.

so that's principle one.

And two, I wanted to walk you through the five key

SaaS platforms that exist today and the platform shifts

that have happened over the last 20 years in SaaS and why now?

There's a unique opportunity and an incredible macro trend

because of this shift where they are.

Now here's a big question What do you do with this?

You can't be like, Okay, TC, let me just go build a CRM company.

That's AI first.

What does that even mean?

How would I compete?

And they're building their own AI features.

That's where principle number three comes in.

But before I go into that, let me just pause here for a second reason

to see the power in this.

There are so many incredible SaaS ideas, but are you starting to see.

If you were to zoom out why the SaaS industry is so special,

why these five categories are so enormous and there's so much opportunity

you start to see why during a platform shift, there is so much power to be had.

In starting a SaaS company.

Under one of these categories,

I started to see how incredible this can be

when you start to actually apply it historically, the power in this.

Can I just get a

yes in the comments below and also smash a like button for the YouTube algorithm?

It just loves it when you do that.

And so do we. We put a lot of love in these videos.

Also, if you're in this stage where you're mapping out

what's my software idea going to be, how do I grow it?

How do I get in customer conversations?

You should grab a completely free copy.

My five point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide.

You don't have to go anywhere right now.

I'll tell you about it at the end of this episode.

Let's go to principle number three

and really talk about how this all comes together.

First of all, there are three breaks down into two parts.

The first part is what kind of product can you build today,

given where air is at and given the competitive dynamics in the space?

That's part one.

And part two is how do you compete with these big guys

and how you position yourself to take advantage of this platform shift.

let's talk about how you can actually meaningfully add value

to this ecosystem if you want to just start from scratch.

One way you could approach it is you could say, look,

if we were to completely reimagine how CRM works in an A.I.

world, how would we do that?

That's one way to do it.

Now, admittedly, in order to build something like that,

that can compete with the default chrome might be kind of tough.

If you go raise an enormous amount of funding

and you fund that development and say, Look, we're going to build the CRM

from the ground up. We're going to rebuild it.

Thinking about A.I., that could be a great venture capital idea.

If you are thinking more in terms of self-funded or you doing a tiny seed round

and maybe this is

your first SaaS company, then that may not be the best strategy for you.

But here's the thing.

Here's how you can actually compete in this space with this platform shift.

The companies that really won in prior platform shifts,

they didn't just rebuild everything from scratch.

They took the most important component of what these big platforms did

and made that 20% better.

In some cases,

they sat on top of the existing platforms and disrupted them from inside.

the best way to really start to take part in this macro trend and take part in

this wave is to start to make CRM, ERP, CMS, HCM,

or by just ten times better on one aspect of it.

The best way to do this is to think in terms of a system of intelligence

system.

Intelligence essentially takes the data from all of these platforms.

One of them are all of them

and pulls it into your platform.

It then couples in a large language model

or your own model, depending on how deep you want to go the AI bandwagon,

and it starts to actually generate net new value.

Once you take in all of this data, there are a couple of different value

add products that you can create in this ecosystem.

One thing that you could do is you can start to do predictions.

You can look at your unique set of data

and maybe plus some of your own proprietary data,

and you can start to say, you know what, based on our proprietary data

and all the data we're pulling in or some of the data we're pulling in,

we can start to make better predictions about these businesses

and we're going to sell that.

So that way we're not completely disrupting CRM or ERP.

Either one of these or all of these, but we're just going to make it

ten times better for one aspect of it, and that's going to be our land.

And then expand strategy.

Another thing you could do is actually do automation.

You could add a features to these platforms that are super creative

that makes it work.

One thing that used to take ten clicks for a user in one of these platforms to do

when you plug in your product,

they can actually do it with just one click instead of ten.

That's automation and using AI, you can streamline

entire workflows that run on any one of these platforms.

And then from there

you can expand into other workflows and start to expand your footprint.

And the third one, and probably the most audacious one is create an entire agent's.

Agents are something that's still early in AI.

There's a lot of talk about it, but hasn't quite come out yet.

But agents are essentially a thing where right now if you were to sell CRM

software, you would hire a salesperson

then you would give the salesperson a CRM software.

An example of an agent

would be you no longer hire a salesperson, you just hire this sales agent,

which is an agent that does a bunch of the work for you.

We're not quite there yet,

but we're going to get there faster than we realize, where people aren't

really just buying software to augment humans.

They're just buying software that replaces humans and those are agents.

So you can start to experiment with that.

And admittedly, that's a little early.

I bet when I do this video in 2025, we're going to be that much closer to it

faster than we realize.

It's still early days, but that's where it's headed.

Any one of these three types of value adds to these existing platforms

is the best way to take advantage of this macro trend.

I'll do two things for you.

One, you're not going to try and rebuild this entire thing

and convince customers to move their critical

infrastructure to you because they just won't.

You're just going to add a value to that platform.

Are you going to amass users and then you're going to expand from there?

That's a much better strategy, especially during these platform shifts.

There's two reasons for this.

The first one is it's actually a land and expand

strategy, meaning you land in one of these platforms, you add value mass users,

and over time you start to add more functionality

and maybe over time, you start to replace some of these platforms.

That way, you don't have to go in as a two person startup

and try to convince a company on how they shouldn't be on Salesforce.

It should be on your CRM and they should trust you

and put their entire sales process on you

or do the same for the ERP or their entire manufacturing and backend

operations run on your new air driven platform.

That's a hard sell.

land and expand model makes it where you are creating

one feature are a set of features that are just ten times

better than the native platform, and you're sitting on top of them

and you're adding value using this type of workflow.

Now that's a land and expand model.

What you can do from there is you can land and then start to expand

on the number of workflows and maybe over time,

as you build up momentum and customers and raise more money,

you can start to really be a contender to one of these platforms.

Who knows?

You could be the next Salesforce, you could be the next ERP

platform like Siebel, you could be the or SAP.

Those haven't nearly as much.

could be the next CMS platform replacing WordPress completely, reimagining

how content is stored and deployed on the Internet.

You could be the next HCM platform or the next big platform.

could do that.

That's one way to create

a multibillion dollar company, and that's a perfectly great way to do it.

The other thing that happens during these platform shifts, Remember

I was telling you during principle number two that in the end, really tie

this together on how something really special happens doing these partnerships.

Well, the other thing that you can do

is instead of going after the expansion and try to replace one of these platforms,

you can actually go for an exit into one of these platforms.

Here's the thing.

When Salesforce came around and started kicking everyone else's ass

in the CRM space

because they were moving to cloud, Oracle scrambled to, Microsoft scrambled.

And you know what?

They did Their own product managers who go home at 5 p.m.

couldn't innovate fast enough to move to the cloud.

They couldn't innovate fast enough to move to mobile.

So what they did is they went out there and they said, Cool.

What are the startups in our ecosystem that are integrated with us, that

are already providing a better experience in terms of this platform shift?

Let's just go buy them.

And that's the best way we can compete

with some of these other guys that are starting to eat our lunch.

And so that's something that becomes available to you.

And that's a huge

thing that happens to startups, especially during these platform shifts.

These well entrenched players have a lot of money, but a lot of lazy

product managers and what they need are uniquely gifted founders

and dedicated founders like you that understand this platform shift.

They're creating better products as part of this shift,

and they're more than happy to take some of their billions of dollars

on their balance sheet buy you.

that may or may not be your goal, but that's still an option,

and that's something that happens in an incredible way

during these platform shifts.

So let's recap. I covered a lot here.

Number one, the five core ideas that exist in SaaS today.

The biggest ones is CRM, customer relationship management,

$76 billion market ERP enterprise resource planning,

$54 billion market, CMS content

management systems, $24 billion market, HCM 26

billion market and by business intelligence $32 billion market.

All of these over the last 20 years have gone through platform shifts.

They went from the servers and the CD to the cloud, then to mobile.

And now I during each of these platform shifts,

new companies, startups come in and find a way to generate net new value.

They often start with the land and expand model.

They solve for one feature that ten times better then expands from there.

And a lot of times

the well-entrenched players start to get their butt kicked by the new startups

that are becoming the expansion and becoming the true platforms.

So they go out and buy the other players in the market so that they can keep up.

Either way,

this is your opportunity to take advantage of this massive platform shift.

The best way to start is through this simple model Build a systems

of intelligence.

Start with the data from these well-entrenched players.

Find your proprietary data, plug in your MLM or your own model,

depending on how brave you want to be,

and then look into how you can drive predictions.

Automation for the people already using the platforms or entire autonomous agents.

And this is how you take advantage of this massive

platform shift that's happening in SaaS today.

So now you know exactly what the key five ideas

are that I'm excited about that have always been the best five ideas.

Just look at the numbers, the way platform shifts happen.

How to actually take advantage of it and what the exit opportunities are

when you get into it.

Now, what you may not know is, T.K., how do I really get this going?

Well, the best way to get this going is to get into

as many customer conversations as possible

and make sure you're building a great product.

This is why I created my five point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide.

Insider's Guide.

We get into brass tacks on how to build a go to market machine

so that you can accelerate your path to that next stage of growth.

To grab your copy, just go to get unstoppable dot com slash

strategy, get unstoppable dot com slash strategy.

It's completely free.

It's packed with my best stuff.

you can actually understand

how to validate the market you're in and take advantage of this platform shift.

Also, if you got value from this video, please smash it like button

for the YouTube algorithm.

We put a lot of love into these videos and we just YouTube loves it,

but so do we, which means the world to us.

When we see you hitting the like button,

you got value and started to get your your creativity going.

If you're iterating on an idea now, you see a path forward.

Please put in the comments. I love hearing from founders.

If you have a fellow founder,

maybe a future co-founder, that you want to build a company with a team member,

be part of a Slack group or WhatsApp

or with other founders, please share this video with them.

We want to serve the SaaS community more, to serve as many founders as possible

to build incredible software companies during this platform shift.

also I drop an episode like this every single Sunday with actionable

strategies and tactics on how to build scale and exit SaaS companies.

So be sure to hit that subscribe button and that bell icon that way

you'll get notified. Every single time I drop in episode.

And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy

for their life and their business when you are with us.

Yours is going to be unstoppable.

I'm T.K., and I'll see the next episode are inside

the five point SaaS Growth Strategy Guide link below.

Take care, everybody.