"You can't look at the competition and say you're going to do it better. You have to look at them and say you're going to do it differently." — Steve Jobs
As the world of apps and SaaS continues to evolve, cross-platform software integration has become the baseline expectation, not a premium feature. Gone are the days of the all-in-one platform that aspires to meet every need.
Copying a competitor is not a strategy for survival. Your solution ultimately needs a unique value proposition. But it is equally unrealistic to assume you must reinvent every wheel to remain competitive. In decades of SaaS work, I have never been part of a development effort where some element of the build wasn't drawn from an open-source framework or third-party foundation.
A real estate mortgage lending company engaged us to replace a series of complex, interconnected spreadsheets and Word documents that served as their internal workflow engine. As we worked through their deeply intricate workflow, we realized the process was an accretion of disappointments — layers of workarounds built on top of SaaS products that had never fully met their needs.
The breakthrough came when we discovered their lead analyst's process was actually an improvement upon a specific SaaS product currently in the market. We trialed that product, along with several others in the competitive landscape, and suddenly the conceptual language he had been speaking became clear. We weren't starting from zero — we were mapping improvements from a known baseline. The final solution exceeded the client's initial expectations with only marginal additional development cost.
Roadmap Considerations
◆ What software in the marketplace already accomplishes comparable tasks? Have you actually used it? ◆ How will the software you are designing compete with or integrate alongside current solutions in your customer's stack? ◆ Could a lightweight middleware SaaS solution, connecting existing platforms, provide more value with less risk than a full build?