SaaStr Pro Snippets come from discussions that members of SaaStr Pro have in our monthly ask-me-anything (AMA) webinars with SaaS experts.
This week’s snippet comes from a great question one of our members asked Jason Lemkin:
Can you succeed targeting mid-market business with $300 – $750 MRR pricing plans?
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The next question is: according to your experience, can a SaaS company that targets mid-sized businesses with $300 to $750 MRR plans succeed?
Look…you will get lots of advice all over the internet talking about SMBs versus enterprise and closing big deals versus self-serve. You know what’s great? No one’s talking about the mid-market. No one. I haven’t seen a thousand great blog posts. I haven’t I haven’t read the blog mid-market.com. Maybe we should reserve that domain. This is a great white space in any large category.
For example: in CRM, you’ve got a million folks. You’ve got you’ve got killer companies like Pipedrive at the bottom of CRM. You’ve got Salesforce at the high end, but who’s going mid-market?
Another example: look at Intacct, which was just bought four billion dollars. Intacct had an amazing journey, but it took a long time. They were the early cloud financial option and they essentially are a mid-market play. They’ve gone Enterprise (and they’re a great sponsor for us), and they are able to dominate a segment of cloud financials that other folks weren’t focused on and close these great five-figure deals all the time. $300 – $750 MRR is a very attainable, easy price point for mid-market companies.
So go analyze the market and attack the folks with a hundred to a thousand employees. They need they need the hand-holding of an enterprise account and they need the ease of use of an SMB. Most people can’t do that. Most people that can build a beautiful, elegant application that “self onboards” aren’t good at the hand-holding you need for business process change, and most folks that are great at business process change at the high-end, they’re great at throwing a team at solving your problem, but they don’t create elegant products.
Look at the products out there that cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Maybe you haven’t used them, but they all solve user experience and onboarding issues with people… and that works but it does leave this white space.
The other good news is customers are even more value sensitive in 2018 than they’ve ever been. Meaning, it’s harder to rip people off, but they are spending so much more on the cloud.
So I remember in the old days of Echosign, we launched a $299 a month plan. It was it was seen as expensive, and now it’s cheap.
If you can provide a great product for the mid-market $300-$1,000 a month is great…..just provide the value. So I love this space.
