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- 🏔️ Compound Startups
Hey there,
Welcome to the SaaS Hill, a weekly newsletter that tries to predict the future of SaaS.
Let's discuss Compound Startups 🧩.
⭐️️ Intro
After watching Parker Conrad's webinar on Compound SaaS startups, I was inspired to explore the potential impact they could have on the software industry.
Recent news in the SaaS industry, including Adobe's acquisition of Figma, Zoom's launch of Zoom mail and calendar, Outreach's purchase of Canopy and Sameplan, and Canva's introduction of Visual Worksuite, reinforce the potential of Compound SaaS startups. These events exemplify the trend of companies unifying multiple software solutions within a single, integrated platform, creating more seamless and streamlined experiences for customers.
Here is what we will discuss today:
6 predictions about Compound Startups
19 examples of Compound Startups
4 experts to follow
1 Twitter thread
2 useful links
1 pitch deck
🤔 Predictions
In the future, many SaaS and vertical SaaS products are expected to evolve into Compound Startups. Established SaaS brands that have only one SKU will experience a slowdown in growth and will need to develop robust multi-SKU platforms to remain competitive.
Compound SaaS startups will continue to prioritize integration with other SaaS products and platforms, providing customers with seamless workflows that enhance their experience.
Compound SaaS startups will consolidate various SaaS products into a single platform, creating a more seamless and integrated experience for customers.
Compound SaaS startups will continue to acquire more products and build out their portfolio of offerings, further strengthening their position in the market:
Key elements of a successful Compound SaaS product include:
a unified data layer capable of supporting integrated components
a big vision that addresses a significant problem
multiple SKUs and sub-products
a seamless experience across features and sub-products
integrations that create a more powerful, closed system
Compound SaaS products will continue to gain popularity as they help customers:
decrease costs
increase user and feature adoption
optimize expenses by eliminating the need to integrate different tools, support APIs, and rely on IT and engineering resources.
🏢 Products
Salesforce > Customer 360 > Slack, Mulesoft, CRM, Marketing, AI, Ecommerce, Service
Workday > Enterprise Managament Cloud > Financial Management, HR Management
Rippling > Workforce Management Platfrom > HR Cloud, Finance Cloud, IT Cloud
Zoom > Zoom Platform > Meetings, Chat, Webinars, Events, Workspace, Email, Calendar, AI
Hubspot > The HubSpot CRM Platform > Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub,
ZoomInfo > ZoomInfo RevOS > Chorus, Chat, Engage, SalesOS, MarketingOS, OperationsOS, TalentOS
Twilio > Customer Engagement Platform > Segment, SendGrid, SMS, Whatsapp, Calls, Video
Stripe > Financial infrastructure > Payments, Checkout, Subscriptions, Fraud, Invoices
Monday.com > Monday Work OS > Monday CRM, Monday Dev, Monday Work
Canva > Canva’s Visual Worksuite > Docs, Whiteboards, Video, Websites, Social
Adobe > Adobe Creative Cloud > Figma, Photoshop, PDF, Graphics, Video, 3D
Outreach > Sales Execution Platform > Engagement, Action Plans, KAIA, Deals, Forecasts
Intercom > Inbox, Live Chat, Help Center, AI, Chatbots, SMS, Product Tours
Amplitude > Analytics, Experiments, CDP
Hopin > Webinars, Events, Streams, Community, Videos
Atlassian > Trello, Jira, Halp, Confluence, Bitbucket
Dropbox > Storage, Backups, Documents, E-sign, Passwords
Lucid > Diagramming, Whiteboards
Zendesk > CRM, Service, Help Center, HR
📖 Experts to Follow
Parker Conrad > CEO at Rippling
Marc Benioff > CEO at Salesforce
Henry Schuck > CEO & Founder at ZoomInfo
Manny Medina > CEO at Outreach
🖼️ Pitch Deck
Check out Rippling Series B Pitch Deck and a blog post on how Rippling raised a $45M Series A without a pitch deck to support their Compound Startup vision.
Rippling Series B Pitch Deck
🔗 Useful Links
The One Thing Everyone Knows about building a startup is wrong with Parker Conrad (Rippling)
Why building a “compound startup” might be the next, great, non-obvious SaaS play
🐦️ Twitter Thread
Gokul Rajaram on Compound Startups
🤝 Related SaaS Trends
🏔 Operating Systems > or interesting brand positioning for a SaaS product
Thanks for reading. See you next time 👋