Continuing with the post The Next Generation Competitor to Every Public SaaS Company, one of the questions that came up is how to identify when a SaaS product has entered “incumbent mode” and shows signs that there’s room for new upstarts. Good question. We’ve all used a product that’s solid, but unchanged for many years, and know that it’s a last generation product.
Here are a few signs of a last generation SaaS product:
- Pace of Innovation – New features come to a halt. Product polishing continues but substantial new features are rare. The focus is on profitably scaling sales and marketing.
- User Interface / User Experience – Interface changes are disruptive and avoided. Newer UI/UX conventions, and tools like an Angular/React, aren’t a priority.
- Contract Terms / Flexibility – Longer term contracts are required. Renewal details aren’t negotiable. The position of strength is flexed.
A last generation product readily shows its age. Staying up-to-date with a modern UI/UX and feature set is much harder than it looks. As companies grow and scale, continuing what’s proven takes precedence over innovation.
What else? What are some other signs of a last generation SaaS product?
David Cummings on Startups 
I think three other features of the most successful SaaS companies are:
– MSAs that include data co-op provisions from the beginning to enable benchmarking and non-competitive data sharing
– Products that use APIs to solve the entire business problem of particular function (lead gen, sales ops, HR, etc) by either 1) being a system of record like Salesforce 2) being a middleware layer like Segment or Liveramp or 3) easily integrating with other systems of record
– Products that make upgrading (account expansion), onboarding, and in-app customer success (churn reduction) first classes citizens