Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mads_quist 63 days ago
Although I absolutely understand the frustration expressed by the author, I find the notion that SaaS companies are somehow 'evil' because they optimize for the 80/20 rule a bit arrogant. Anyone working in SaaS - or really in any business- understands that you need to prioritize. In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits. And that's absolutely OK.
3 comments
raw_anon_1111 63 days ago
The right answer is just to have a well documented publicly available API for your customers and eat your own dogfood.
link
pixl97 63 days ago
>In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.

Moloch demands babies be scarified to generate maximum profits!

For one, this is a very US concentric way of thinking. Secondly, if a human person thought like this we'd consider them to be an anti-social psychopath, which directly conflicts with the more recent SCOTUS ruling that companies are humans too.

So, yes, we have legally mandated companies be evil. It's been working out well for us in the US as prices skyrocket and any competition is bought up or abused with patents/IP.

link
shardullavekar 63 days ago
> In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.

No denying that. SaaS started with a user problem at the center of it and as they scaled, forgot about an individual user. This only presents the user frustration and a possible solution to it.

link
drewbeck 63 days ago
> as they scaled, forgot about an individual user

If you're building for individual users you're not going to succeed. We all prioritize for broad success from the beginning.

I'm very into the idea of inversion of control and giving users this flexibility but I agree with GP that the SaaS company critique is misplaced. I hope you find enough success with 100X that you end up coming to the same conclusion.

I'll also add that one of your video examples is essentially a Twitter spam generator; is that the kind of feature you think SaaS companies should be prioritizing?

link
shardullavekar 63 days ago
I created that twitter responder after reading this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568028). That wasn't to call out what SaaS companies should prioratise but to show how easy it would be for a user to do it.
link