From IT Consulting to SaaS MicroISV

Don't let the jargon filled title intimidate you. This is not a blog about "paradigm shift" and "value added" "synergy" with all those bombastic buzzword. Nah, this is a blog where I explain and do things, the "kampung" (village, rural, simple) way.

What is IT consulting? Well, you use IT to first trick your customer by gaining their 'con'fidence before in'sult'ing them and run away with their money. HA HA HA

SaaS = Software as a Service. Basically you build a software (usually a website) that offers some sort of service (usually porn or gambling) that charge base on subscription.

MicroISV = Independent Sofware Vendor run by a single person. This person is usually the software developer, manager, accountant, sales, marketing, best friend, father/mother, stressed out person with numerous mortgages and a broken down car.

Ok, with that out of the way, I will proceed with a few reasons why I am moving from IT Consulting (HA HA) to SaaS MicroISV.

1) Growth.
The natural progression for an IT Consulting business goes something like this:
Stage 1 - Make static websites for friends and families for $300.
Stage 2 - Build small accounting and inventory programs for business for $3,000.
Stage 3 - Build large enterprise level suites of software that sells for $10,000.
Stage 4 - Finally, pick up government or industrial contracts that go for $1,000,000 (1 million).
Usually you the founder have already died from old age by the time your business reaches stage 3. Check out HP, Xerox, and IBM. Especially IBM; to have someone like Thomas J. Watson come along and steal the business that you have laboriously sweated blood to expand is just so WTF.

Now compare it with a SaaS business:
Stage 1 - Make website that charges for downloads of music, anime, and anime's music.
Stage 2 - Do periodical marketing and updating of the content.
Stage 3 - Profit!
All this happen within your lifetime! Thank you Southpark underwear collecting Gnomes! You guys are "genius"!

2) Exposure.
IT Consulting is a 1 to 1 business. You (1) <---- Project -----> Customer (1). It will take you forever to get a good customer base to enable you to have repeat business. Remember, the more customer you have, the more source of revenue you have. Now compare this to SaaS. Now its a 1 to Many business; You (1) <---- Project -----> World (M). Imagine building a software in 6 months time and releasing it to a worldwide internet audience of 6,767,805,208 users. Now imagine if 0.1% of those users are your customer. Wow.

3) Maintenance.
Remember IT Consulting business stage 3 from Growth? Well around this time you will have a bunch of software lying around written by your team that uses different technology. Please don't start with the RoR can do everything evangelism. I have yet to see RoR being used to in production for industrial level PLC programming. And please don't say I can write RoR code that can be compiled into the C or Basic logic code which can later be compiled into machine code. Yes, you can also use a jackhammer to hit a hammer to hit a nail into the wall too! Now is that a smart thing to do? What do you think genius? Ok, so you have some software written in C, Basic, and Assembly for PLC projects. You have some Internet banking application written using J2EE. You have some CRM software written using RoR. Now imagine this, all your customer are calling at the same time to fix a bug and have given you a very tight deadline. Are we having fun yet?
Now lets try SaaS. All 6 million of your users complain that the link to a restricted area of your site is not working. No problem, find the link creation code, modify and test it, and publish. All it took was 10 minutes to make 6 million users happy because they can start downloading Hentai again. 10 minutes. Wow.

So now I'm in SaaS. Except that I lack the brainpower to come up with a software. I envy those smart guys who came up with ravejoint. Why can't I think out of the box and come up with stuff like that?! Ooops sorry, thinkingout of box; bad, jargon bad!

PS: Pssst, if you have a good SaaS idea and would like to collaborate gimme a tell!