We have our own customers, too. In addition, the folks white-labelling use us in-house. We aren't strangers to the companies receiving our white-labelled SaaS; we do the initial customer on-boarding and provide all the higher-tier support.
Eleven years and counting....
But hey, you do you! I will be long retired by the time anyone gains traction with a competing offering. See you on the beach!
Pretty much any on-prem software vendor is some mix of direct sales, partner sales, and through distribution. And in the case of, say, a product primarily for SMBs, the mix is probably going to tilt pretty heavily to partners. There's a lot of leverage to using partners and many of them will know and be connected to some market a lot better than you do.
There are differences with SaaS but they may not be as big as you think. For example, AWS mostly started as a go online with your credit card sale. Now? They have a big enterprise sales force and lots of partner relationships.
I bumped into a friend on the street a year ago he and told me about the business he had recently co-founded and taken through YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/partnered. I told my co-founder about it and it became a significant part of his sales toolbox. I saw my friend last week and shared the single criticism my co-founder had. My friend told me they had recently been acquired by a competitor whose core functionality resolved our pain-point.
Strategic partnerships and white-labelling seem to be critical tools for growth in the current climate.
Whether or not there's any white-labeling involved, partnerships (VARs, SIs, now often public cloud providers, etc.) have been a key part of sales strategy for many types of products for decades.
Eleven years and counting....
But hey, you do you! I will be long retired by the time anyone gains traction with a competing offering. See you on the beach!