[adventured]

The baseline features concept for a SaaS company trying to compete, is a formula of hitting enough of the market.

Generic example: 85% quality, lower price point, baseline of features that covers 65% of the market's needs. Each additional feature beyond a certain core, broadly speaking, will tend to have a diminishing return in regards to how much of the market needs/wants it.

[tanilama]

For customer what does 65% of features mean? You either have it or not have it.

[adventured]

I didn't say 65% of features. I said that you hit 65% of the market's needs. That is, that your features cover the required needs of 65% of all customers.

It's a mistake to build a SaaS product and try to include so many features that you cover more than ~3/4 of all customer feature demands in the early years. You're likely to either go broke or never finish, trying it; and if by a small miracle you build that wildly bloated product, you'll likely be unable to support & maintain it properly.

Generic example: the total market for a SaaS product has 30 distinct features across 20 competing companies. 8 of those features get you to 65% of the market's needs (few customers will need all 30, some small % will need ~15 features, the majority will need a modest base set of features, eg ~8). The whole market does not need all 30 of those features. As a highly functional rule, every SaaS product will have a core of minimally required features, beyond that each feature will have a diminishing appeal versus what % of all customers require it. You have to hit a certain threshold of minimum features vs max customers - that formula is a bit different for each product or service, you have to figure that out by experimenting and researching.

Do a select few things, do them well, and at a lower price. It has been a winning formula for the last 200 years of industrial history across an incredible variety of products & services. Or do a few things extraordinarily well, at a higher price; that also works just the same. There are of course exceptions to the rules, you're not going to beat Google in search with a slightly better product most likely, or a slightly faster product (you'd likely need a 10x product to dislodge their overpowering brand, financial position, monopoly).