How has the SaaS business changed in the last ten years? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Ruby on Rails, Founder & CTO at Basecamp, on Quora:
How has the SaaS business changed in the last ten years? When we started, you had to worry about lots of trite basics. Like, will businesses actually pay on a subscription basis for software? It was sort of an unproven hypothesis at the time. And along with that came all the risk-averseness from banks and credit card processors. All that pain and uncertainty is just gone. Poof.
So things have gotten so much easier on the commercial and technical side of things. Already, when we started fifteen years ago, it was pretty easy and cheap to get going. Now it's so much easier and cheaper (free) to get going. It's a marvelous time to be a SaaS entrepreneur!
What hasn't changed, though, is that you still need to build great software and sell it at a reasonable price. And you have to build an audience who'll care. Build It And They Will Come wasn't true then and it isn't true now. And the work to overcome that is for marathoners, not sprinters.