#14 Growth of Direct To Consumer, Grocery as a Service and Cloud spending. Shopify 3 years behind Amazon. Everyone copying Clubhouse. Why a Sales Playbook is not a piece of paper.

May 6, 2021

SaaSification is for business leaders who understand that any business is SaaS business as well as for those who don’t realize it yet.

Manually curated by @luigimallardo

This newsletter has been silent for the last two months because things have been hectic in business and I prefer not to write just to write…

In return this edition is quite dense of real stories and interesting news.

I also wrote a new post.

What is the Sales Playbook and what is not ->

Is the Sales Playbook a template? Many people miss the point on the real nature of this fundamental piece for a scaleup journey. Link.

News on SaaSed-up companies 🗞

Google is aiming to becoming an e-commerce platform to challenge Amazon. Easier said than done. Link.

Shopify 2020 results show that the company’s merchant sales were over 40% of Amazon’s. In that sense Shopify is only three years behind. Shopify is riding a wave of both consumers and brands becoming ready to go direct. It means that giant companies can get access to the same tools as startups. Link

Private Label business has been part of grocery retail for 150 years. Now Amazon seems to be using the same classic playbook. It's a BIG business. Link.

Amazon Prime announced 147 Million Subscribers in the US. Basically in the country there is more than one subscription per household. Link.

Spotify Launches Podcast Subscriptions. Spotify is beating Apple to the punch — Apple’s podcast subscriptions debut next month — and it’s promising creators more favorable business terms and wider distribution. Link.

News on SaaSing-up companies 📈

Subscriptions have the power to change the culture of traditional organization. Synsam Group, Scandinavia’s largest optical chain, with over 500 clinics and 3,500 employees, pioneered an enormously successful subscription program which helped them thrive during the pandemic and has quickly become a central strategic imperative for the company. From selling eyewear to selling eyesight. Link.

Disney Plus reached 100m subscribers after 16 months with the trajectory of growth likely to be even steeper as they launch in new markets. Disney executives originally predicted that Disney Plus would amass between 60 and 90 million subscribers by 2024. Direct-To-Consumer business is the company's top priority. Link.

News on to-be-SaaSed-up companies 📉

What news publishers can learn from Netflix. About $27 in the US buys monthly digital access to Netflix, Disney Plus, and Spotify’s library of 70m recorded songs. For that sum, it is possible to subscribe to one of these news sites: the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times or The Times of London. But not more than one. Link.

Rising Stars

Grocery as a Service. Consumers are taking fewer 73% trips to the grocery store and instead are shopping more at food subscription services and online grocery stores, with 80% of U.S. consumers having shopped online for groceries since COVID-19 outbreak. Experts predict these trends are going to continue to grow. Online grocery service, Hungryroot, has leaned into this change in consumer behavior with their online grocery delivery service model. Link.

Clubhouse seems to have gone quiter in the last few weeks and everyone from Facebook to LinkedIn to Twittter is trying to copy the formula. Neverthless they just announced a new big round of VC investment valuing the company at $4bn, 3 months(!) after a round valuing it at $1bn. Link.

Subscription Billing Platform Chargebee Becomes Unicorn. The company developed an infrastructure for companies to create a subscription business in as little as 10 days and be able to bring in a reliable source of revenue. Link.

SaaS companies

“Cloud spending grew a stunning 23% in 2021, from $270 billion to $330 billion. But that’s just the start.” “Get in Early” to big accounts, almost whatever it takes. Link.

How enterprise-software vendors must adapt to the new era and adopt a new strategic playbook to weather the different challenges ahead. Success will take a renewed strategic focus, a willingness to expand “as-a-service” offerings beyond subscription pricing, and a greater emphasis on profitable growth. Even McKinsey realized that ... Link.

You cannot grow properly only with new clients. As you scale a big portion of additional SaaS revenue must come from existing customers. Look at a few interesting case studies in this blog post of SaaStr (link). Just consider that each marginal 20% of Net Dollar Retention (NDR) is a doubling of company ARR in 5 years (link). Especially when you go upmarket, the opportunities of Customer ARR expansion are bigger. Link.

Interesting reads 📖

Working from home. If you can do your job from anywhere, someone anywhere can do your job. Are superstar employees about to be offshored? Link.

We’re in the midst of a reset, one that is already transforming the economy and what employees, customers and our broader communities expect of companies. Every Company is a Tech Company Now, according to the Times. Link.

The old solutions for solving a crisis no longer work. And so, a new dawn of leadership is needed. Courageous and Compassionate leadership is now a prerequisite for anyone striving to lead organizations within the 'new normal.' Integrity, insight, and inclusiveness are the “three essential qualities of leadership.” Link.

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