[ThePhysicist]

I'm not sure in which areas the author released SaaS products but what's mind-boggling to me is how fast successful SaaS businesses get copied these days, especially if they are rather "simple" (in the sense of being reproducible by a small team without large investment). Privacy-friendly website analytics is maybe a good example. There are literally thousands of companies with almost the same USPs (GDPR-compliant, cookie-less, privacy-first), almost every day a new one tries to launch on Product Hunt. And since everyone is prying for attention it gets more and more difficult to build something that gets noticed at all in those areas. I mean try entering a search term like "GDPR compliant analytics" into Google and you'll be presented with thousands of SEO articles from different analytics companies. I've heard the same thing happens on the app store: As soon as there's something successful, copycats show up in a manner of weeks, trying to capitalize on the successful app. So on one hand the addressable market for SaaS products gets larger every year, but at the same time more and more companies are pushing into that market.

[jerrygoyal]

(most) SaaS businesses have no moat. So, distribution is the key.

[schnebbau]

This is true.

If you are building a crud application (todo list/trello, social media scheduling, and analytics are all examples of simple crud applications), the moment you see success it will be cloned by people in eastern Europe, India, or SE Asia, and priced at 10% of yours.

A moat or barrier to entry is a must now. Solve hard problems.

[tluyben2]

Depends what you want to achieve of course; there are many copies of most services around which, in certain regions of the world, do well. There are a lot of SaaS products, notably all kinds of project or task management applications, of which there are 100s of 1000s around, where the owner(s) makes enough profit to have a nice, comfortable life even though there should be crippling competition. I had two of those (in the task management/PM space; I had many more in other spaces) which I both sold, but they made me a very comfortable year income for the years I had them, without any work besides the initial investment of building them (which was not very hard as they are crud apps).

If you are not interested in becoming a (global) market leader, there are a lot of opportunities up for grabs. In the EU (and I guess that goes for other regions in the same way), a lot of companies buy local; the company I currently work for is Dutch and, although we have many competitors globally which might be cheaper or better, there is simply enough income to be made for a company with an office, employees, better than market pay and steady growth only from Dutch clients who rather do business with other Dutch people and inside the EU. GDPR and other EU guidelines and rules rather worked in favour of many companies here; Govs and many other institutions for instance demand all data to be inside the EU and signed contracts that they will never share data outside the EU; many US/Asia SaaS products simply do not offer that with guarantees acceptable (or to be trusted) to companies here.