sutton020

If you're building a modern SaaS solution for the Fortune 5,000,000 , the importance of your marketing website cannot be overstated. In the old world of enterprise software, most software vendors used to have pretty lame websites. Most of them were poorly designed and looked very technical and uninspiring, and the only images they contained were the seemingly obligatory stock photos (suit-wearing business people trying to out-smile each other, handshake close-ups and of course an attractive headset-wearing woman – often the same one on multiple vendors' sites!). Compare that with the website of a modern SaaS solution like Zendesk and I'm sure you'll understand what I mean. To be fair, those old-school software vendors were probably able to afford having bad websites since the Internet just wasn't their primary sales or marketing channel. By contrast, if you market a SaaS application using a low-touch sales model, most of your customers will have very little interac...

Last August, Marc Andreessen wrote a great essay titled "Why software is eating the world" . In his article, which got a lot of attention in the tech world, Marc explains why and how a variety of industries have been and continue to be disrupted by software. Read it if you haven't read it yet, it's a well-written and inspiring post by one of the most successful and knowledgable people in the Internet industry. Recently I read about the concept of "dematerialization" (in the book "Abundance – The Future Is Better Than You Think" by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler). The book quotes Bill Joy saying "We're seeing the tip of the dematerialization wave, like when a phone dematerializes a camera. It just disappears." and goes on to list a number of other goods and services that are now available with the average smartphone. Software is eating the world, but the smartphone is pretty hungry too. There's no real contradiction here tho...