Thursday, February 21, 2008

I saw SaaS upon a mountain

I signed up for this Wild Apricot service a month or so ago....

Thought I should play around with it and see if I can actually have some use for it.

Turns out that I didn't have the time to play with it, and so never really ended up going back to their site to check out their cool features.

My trial expired today. I was expecting a "sorry to hear you're not interested....please come back again soon". I must say I was pleasantly shocked to see a 30-day trial end with me being an official(albeit non-paying) customer of a company/service.

In fact, I was messing around with Helix Mobile server(30-day trial as well), and aside from the product key, I've received no communique from their sales team on how to best use their product. As it turns out, just getting their product SETUP is so complicated, that I'm now experimenting with Darwin Streaming Server.

Point of the story? SaaS rocks. Your sales life-cycle has new meaning, because you are able to provide information about your service at any stage of the cycle, you're able to offer flexible pricing models at any stage of the cycle, and best part....you can let your customer just use your software for as long as they like to see if they can actually get some basic needs solved.

It's a really honest way of doing business.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Preetam,
Found your blog while searching for saas in India. We checked out wildapricot too but are not using it as it had some features missing.

Cheers,
Sahil

anon said...

Hello:

looks like you guys are doing some interesting stuff. let's be in touch.

-preetam