How the underdog SaaS companies differentiated themselves and disrupted the market
This article contains a long list of the underdog SaaS companies’ success stories that disrupted the market and beat the giants. You will not find its growth strategy, instead, you will find how the companies choose their MVPs, differentiated, and positioned itself amongst other existing players.
Will be updated frequently
Figma with easier, lighter, and cloud basis tools for collaboration merged with Adobe
Incumbents: I will not forget the time when I learnt to remove background, make the photo prettier, and adjust the color tone with Adobe photoshop and its other tools
How it wins the market: It enables design collaborations online with a smooth experience (it’s difficult to build low latency online image editing collaborative tools)
Google suites (Doc, PPT, Sheet) make Microsoft looks old with their collaborative feature focus
Incumbents: Microsoft offices! Who still remembers work your own things offline?
How it wins the market: Google docs disrupted the market by focusing on having the core functions for Words, Presentation, Sheets; and make them online! Users can freely collaborate together and comment to each other’s work. To note, on Excel they focused on lite users first which we can see now that heavy users such as bankers, consultants are not a big fans of Google Sheets.
Salesforce wins with cloud basis focus over software giants Oracle and SAP
Incumbents: big companies such as Oracle and SAP requires heavy integration, expensive, and complicated software-purchased model.
How it wins the market: quick to set up, integrated easily with existing systems, easy to pay for per user, and would always run fast.
Source:
Discord tap into specific niche to avoid battles with Slack
Incumbents: Slack focuses on work and text; Whatsapp focuses on daily conversation; Facebook focuses on posts, pictures, and videos.
How it wins the market: Focused on a vertical niche (gamers) by perfecting audio and video call communications (small lags, clear sounds, etc) and communities approach
Source:
Telegram focus on privacy as positioning to gain market share
Incumbents: Whatsapp with limited social network features and security concerns after being acquired by Facebook and updated its T&C
How it wins the market: Focus on privacy and security (i.e. send secret message that disappear after certain point in time), with more social network features (i.e. can host more people in a group compared with Whatsapp)
Source:
https://sea.mashable.com/tech/14246/what-you-need-to-know-about-telegram-the-whatsapp-alternative
