Yesterday I was talking to the head of marketing at a fast-growing, <100 person SaaS startup. We were talking about the modern marketing stack and he mentioned that they pay for 35 different SaaS products. Yes, 35 different marketing apps at one small business. Some of the app categories included marketing automation, social media management, A/B testing, SEO analytics, etc.
Here are a few questions that come to mind:
- Is there an upper limit to how many marketing apps a small business will use?
- When does app fatigue set in?
- How many are apps require daily work vs ones that are set it and forget it?
- How is reporting done across so many apps?
SaaS is unique in that once the business has $500,000 in recurring revenue, it’s hard to kill. Thus, there’s a huge cottage industry of SaaS marketing apps that provide value. It’ll be interesting to watch the industry over time and see how it plays out. My prediction: there’s no upper limit of marketing apps and we’ll keep seeing more and more.
What else? What are some more thoughts on the idea that there are 35 SaaS marketing products at one small business?
David Cummings on Startups 
What types of apps were they?
That’s an interesting question – and that number likely doesn’t count “free” products which might 2X that 35 number.
@akibalogh – You can do a check on any site for marketing products installed using a plugin like Ghostery or Datanyze. We also recently put together a study that gives into the stacks of 19 high-growth companies here: http://www.growhack.com/2016/07/growth-stack-study-top-companies-reveal-their-marketing-tools/
Yes, I’d love to know what the 35 were. Seems high.
It also means there are 35 data silos filling up with no means of analyzing or leveraging the whole. What’s needed is a meta-analytics layer that can accept all the silo’d data and normalize it for meaningful insight mining.
Clément Vouillon of Point Nine Cap had an interesting article about this a couple months ago: https://medium.com/point-nine-news/the-evolution-of-the-saas-stack-and-what-could-come-next-6a8f58385e57
I see an opportunity for an app that makes sense of the data generated by all of your apps and quickly controls all of them from a single dashboard.
I’ve looked at the tools used by some companies using Siftery. The results are quite impressive, some companies really use a lot of tools. For instance: https://siftery.com/company/aircall
It’s interesting to browse them for data, to see which solutions are trending at a given point in time.