Dear SaaStr: What Are Great Examples of Fast Follower Companies That Become Market Leaders?

Dear SaaStr: What Are Great Examples of Fast Follower Companies That Become Market Leaders?

In many ways, All of Them.

• Microsoft. Bought 86-DOS, turned into MS-DOS (which Gates did not invent), which in turn was an improved clone of CP/M. Did not invent BASIC, either. Office in many ways built in part on top of Lotus 1–2–3’s success. Windows after/alongside Mac OS. Etc. etc. etc.
• Facebook. MySpace, Friendster, whatever.
• Google. Yahoo, Altavista, whatever.
• Salesforce. Maybe not a fast follower, but already Siebel Sales.com, etc.
• Apple. Copied Xerox, Altair, everything.
• Square. Very innovative, but a mobile PayPal, etc.
• Zoom.  More a slow follower, but still.
• HubSpot, Marketo, etc. Neither invented the space.  HubSpot’s original CRM was in many ways a clone of Pipedrive.
• Slack. Very innovative, especially in integrations. But we had so many point solutions before, and since.
• Datadog.  Datadog caught up with and blew past New Relic.  Even though in its day, New Relic was just as beloved.
• Almost everything in cybersecurity.  New vendors, new approaches, but the threats are evergreen 😉

This may not be 100% fair and certainly is an over-simplification.   And OpenAI launching ChatGPT first certainly created a huge tidal wave the likes of which we haven’t seen in a generation, even if it was in some ways an unexpected one at first.

But in general, software is about innovating by copying what works, but doing it a lot better, and taking advantage of paradigm changes (AI, Cloud, Mobile, etc.).

This is why you can start a lot of startups pretty green and young.

Even if you really do something brand new, you usually still copy UI/UX elements and paradigms that are already well-proven.

In fact, 70% or so of public SaaS companies are “just” new versions of older categories and products.  Perhaps AI will change this, at least a bit.

More on that here: