In my previous post about platforms, it has instigated an interesting discussion between Juan and Saasmania about SaaS and cloud computing that I want to put here for greater exposure. Juan spoke of an application to send up to 100.000 posts a year, and, as he has to do this with a intership, he doesn’t think that there exists a more cost effective solution. As I have said in a comment in the answers: ‘The problem is, if you have to send a daily offer to your data base of 4 million users, you have to be able to segment by types of client, in order to send customized mailing, also to get opening statistics of opening, ratios of purchase…….’ Do you get the idea?
An Internet business that earns a living with 100.000 clients, and each day, there are more, can get by with almost any inside development. Nevertheless, if in less than three years you have 5 million users, you are inventing a business at the same time it´s growing, and you plan to have 30 million clients in 5 different languages, this is not the correct way.
I want to explain that in my opinion, if you have an ambitious project, it’s better to consider proven platforms and/or services of solid SaaS to be able to concentrate on the business. Many consider that the technology is the ‘core’ of an Internet business, but it rarely is. To the investor who is interested in a business model, and clearly, if everything is going well, it’s all the same to them if the technology is owned or purchased.
When you only have one client, yourself, the investments in technology, and these are constant in an Internet company, end up being much more expensive than an industrial solution, proven in thousand of installations, and it’s not worth saying to me that my model is completely different. I have only seen this a couple of times, and in most cases, a small modifications and adaption in an industrial platforms allow us to advance more quickly and it is a lot of cheaper, and has the advantage of depending less on one or two people who will leave tomorrow to being their own start-up.
