Powering up your favorite SaaS Tools
A famous article, definitely known among entrepreneurs and investors, is Andreessen Horowitz’s article about how “software is eating the world”. As true as this was when the article came out in 2011, it remains true to this day. Almost everything we know got a digital translation: cars, photos, entertainment, food, giving presentations, sports, body, mind, knowledge, … . Everything is tailored to what the sector expected, tailored to customers, tailored to the need that was discovered.
About 10 years later, everyone agrees that it didn’t stop there. A second shift has taken place. We can summarize it this way: “services are eating software”. Everything has become SaaS, software-as-a-service, and you can hardly imagine anything for which a SaaS solution isn’t available. Cars, photos, entertainment, food, sports, body, mind, and knowledge, you name it, it exists. Uber, Instagram, Netflix, Deliveroo, Strava, Runtastic, Strava, Calm, Audible, Amazon Prime, …. You pay some pocket money and you get the full service. The result? It’s necessary that custom software solutions become smarter.
The third wave: On-Top-of-Saas solutions
In comes TPO Agency, surfing a third wave, where we come up with ‘On-Top-of-SaaS-solutions’ that start from a SaaS product and build further on it. We recently developed such a case in collaboration with Focus Advertising. For some of their business-critical processes, they use Airtable, a very powerful tool that allows you to structure just about anything in a kind of database-format.
What they still missed was a handy printout function that would allow them to create and print fully customizable invoices and order forms, all within Airtable itself, where their data already resides. In a successful partnership with Wheelhouse, we pushed Wheelhouse’s JavaScript expertise to the limit to make this happen for Focus Advertising.
A new trend?
Recently, Airtable offered the possibility to access certain APIs that dive into the core of their software. And they are not the only SaaS company that is starting to open up their software to the developer community. They recognize that in order to grow faster and smarter, it’s advantageous to have more hands on the possibilities of their SaaS. For us product builders, this is an excellent opportunity to help build products (on top of great products) that enable customers and users to further deploy the software they use for the things they consider important.
Would you like us to assess if we can build something on top of a SaaS-tool you already love? Give us a call and we’ll set something up!
