Tuesday, September 27, 2011

SMB integrator experiment - Zero sum game


We are acquiring customers organically via inbound-marketing for our workflow product Postoz (http://www.postoz.com).

We wanted to accelerate customer acquisition inorganically & were talking with few SMB solution integrators for partnership deals.

Typically integrators earn their revenue via,
  1. Business consulting.
  2. Technology consulting and implementation.
  3. Support services.
Since our product is SaaS hosted; do-it-yourself; no-coding required solution, it eliminates need for step 2 and 3. Our partnership deal has to be purely based on revenue sharing.

There are other big SaaS vendors playing zero-sum game with these SMB integrators. These vendors are spending multi-millions upfront to acquire large customer base. We don't have such large financial leverage to spend millions on customer acquisition.

Fun part of startup is creating greater economic value out of nothing rather than corporate style 5-8 year break-even period to recoup invested millions.

We have to make ourselves more reachable for customers world wide & we should find direct path to customers.