[yodon]

Nice web page. $600/year to npm run electron around a web page seems a bit steep but if people will pay you for it more power to you, at least until someone else makes a site to do it for $45/mo, and then someone else for $39/mo, and then ...

[quickthrower2]

Except it doesn't work like that. Businesses will prefer to go for the most well known or branded. The $600 a year is nothing to them. Segment being a case in point.

[yodon]

There are zero barriers to entry here. If this becomes anything past ramen profitable it will have a ton of competitors all with equally professional websites and enough of those competitors will attempt to use lower pricing as a means of capturing market share to guarantee rapid downward pricing.

[quickthrower2]

If that is the case then there are "zero" barriers to entry for many simple SaaS models though. Wufoo, Dropbox etc. With AWS/Azure etc you can spin services like this up pretty easily. So why hasn't someone outdone Dropbox with a $5/a month offering?

[yodon]

> why hasn't someone outdone Dropbox with a $5/a month offering?

Because Dropbox and Wufoo have huge barriers to entry that new competitors must overcome in order to succeed.

Dropbox is a collaboration tool. The benefit to users of a collaboration tool is generally described as the square of the number of users. Even if you have a bigger constant multiplier out front, that n^2 factor is a barrier to entry you will have a very hard time overcoming as a competitor of Dropbox. Electron as a service has no such n^2 multiplier, so it's competitors will be able to threaten them long after launch.

Wufoo lacks the n^2 in number of users multiplier that Dropbox has but it still has a multiplier that is at least linear, maybe higher, in the number of 3rd party integrations of their product (if the typical Wufoo user wants to integrate it with one app or technology, it's linear, if the typical Wufoo user wants to integrate with two or three other apps or technologies it's n^2 or n^3 in number of integrations, my guess is the actual number is something like n^1.5). Wufoo is big enough that there are many thousands of products and blog posts that integrate with it, making one click integration possible in many cases and "follow this step by step tutorial" integrations possible in countless others. Any new competitor will have a very hard time unseating Wufoo because of the difficulty in overcoming these network effects. Again, Electron as a service has no such network effects, at least as marketed today.

When people talk about "barriers to entry," network effects like these (having to do with either number of users or number of integrations) are generally the main things they are talking about.