B2B SAAS?
Looking at a lot of the recent startup companies, its intersting how most of them are more like selling services? instead of building actual tech. If you click on their website it never clearly explain what's the technology they use, and instead give give you with some fancy terminologies. And the fancy terminology I found for this type of companies is called SAAS. If you look at something like Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch, 65% of companies fall into this category. That’s an overwhelming majority
HUH?
It makes sense that so many people are building b2b SAAS. It’s scalable, subscription-based, and relies heavily on user experience and marketing, instead of deep technical innovation. Slack, Datadog, and Dropbox are great examples—they offer streamlined, easy-to-access tools for businesses.
It seem to me that they are more like repackaging and optimize existing technologies and selling it to enterprise ecosystems, where companies would pay quite a lot just for sustainability and reliability. And having a subscription based model just lock these big companies into paying more. (speaking of this why does UWaterloo have like 15 different platform for homework submission, course content.. for each course. (where my tuition go)).
Engineers and developers who might have pursued hardware or deep tech are moving toward SaaS. To some extend building hardware has higher barriers, risky, and slow compared to the relatively low barrier to entry and quick feedback loops of software.
TOO MUCH AWS
There’s also the issue of over-reliance on cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. These platforms have become so entrenched that they’re almost inseparable from the SaaS ecosystem. Makes sense why nowadays there are so many jobs on AWS.