Three Tips for Choosing the Right SaaS to Build On

Recently Springpad, a well-adopted service that provided a visual way to clip, save, and organize content and lists online shut down. It was quite sudden, quite disappointing, but also quite confusing. Springpad started in 2008, raised over $7MM in funding, had some great reviews and loyal users, was rich with relevant features, and had so much potential to partner with other brands and services in interesting ways. So what was the problem?

As one FastCo article discusses, monetization was a problem for Springpad. They built a great product, but didn’t build a business. The hidden story is how this affects the army of developers who had built a business around their platform.  Springpad’s demise reminds us that if you’re not a little uncomfortable relying on someone else’s business model you’re probably not paying enough attention to risk.  Here are three tips for those evaluating a 3rd party SaaS platform before you build:

1. Question Silver Bullets

Try to describe what Springpad was. You’ll realize it was a mashup of too many things. It’s a reminder app, a shopping list, a bookmarking tool, a deal finder, a recipe keeper, an inspiration collector, and a social feed, and more.  It was attempting to be a silver bullet for organization addicts. Yet with so many ways to leverage Springpad, one was never quite sure when the Springpad moment had materialized.

2. Make Sure There’s a Balance

The Springpad team did a lot of great work. They released a good deal of solid and thoughtful features. But did they strike a balance in the decisions that informed their roadmap and/or business model? For example:

• Did they balance user acquisition (and usage) with releasing new features?
  Did they have enough users leveraging enough of their features to validate where their roadmap was going? When considering whether a platform is worth leveraging, it’s important you know not only where it is but where it’s going.

• Did they balance product development with monetization efforts?
  Did Springpad take time to balance product evolution (the fun stuff!) with monetizing the features they had?  Pinterest’s steady evolution is a good example to follow.  There’s a reason Pinterest focused on onboarding brands but closed their API. They developed value for what already existed before evolving the product.

3. Require a Compelling Value Proposition

Over time, Springpad built a lush product and with every new release it felt like a natural and obvious progression of the platform. But they still seemed to be missing the special sauce that set them apart in an interesting way from all other similar solutions.  In a crowded market sometimes the victor is the one with the clearest message.

Committing to a specific SaaS platform can be a big decision. While making sure it can fulfill your feature requirements is a large factor in the decision, more times than not, the key deciding factor should really be based on the viability of that platform’s business and progress in general.