SaaS or Service as a Software is becoming the fastest growing industry in the world. Many entrepreneurs and businesses want to be a part of this industry by either creating a new SaaS product, investing in the existing SaaS products, or simply acquiring it. But creating a SaaS product is easier said than done.
A great SaaS product offers its customer a hassle-free and easy-to-use experience. Suppose you want to create a SaaS product and do not know where to start or need a bit of inspiration. Then, we have analyzed a few examples of the popular SaaS companies that will surely inspire you to create your own SaaS product.
Why Create a SaaS Product?
There’s no one answer, but people create SaaS products due to the value they provide to the end user. These products sell well because of the flexibility they offer, and most of the customer information is stored in a secure data center owned or rented by the SaaS provider. Hence, it’s a profitable business to get into.
10 Best Examples of SaaS Products to Inspire Your Own
Dropbox
Dropbox is the perfect SaaS company for cloud storage that makes it accessible for businesses and individuals to store data. It can also let you share and collaborate on files with your peers, employees, and colleagues. Dropbox makes it easier to create a smart workplace that enables your workforce to work from around the world. Businesses that employ freelancers or have remote employees rely on Dropbox to share work.
A great feature of Dropbox is the smart content suggestion which recommends the user content based on their activity. Team members can also collaborate without any obstacles with Paper from Dropbox.
Why is it the best example for a SaaS company? Dropbox is a beloved SaaS company that allows a user-friendly, sharing, and storing files platform with real-time sync feature. No wonder Dropbox generates about revenue of $1.4 billion with over 500 million registered users.
Lumen5
Lumen5 is an industry-leading video editor SaaS app that helps businesses create and edit videos with its user-friendly interface. You can use its drag-and-drop interface, or it can automatically create video from any URL or text. Lumen5 converts the text into a video that can be further customized with text positioning, highlighting keywords, adding colors, adjusting the resolution, adding images, and changing the font style. Lumen5 has an active user base with more than 220K monthly visitors making it one of the most popular SaaS video editors.
Lumen5 uses its custom AI to determine the length of a frame according to the text. Users can select the media file, and the automated workflow AI will calculate the text position to be placed on the frame. The AI also automatically highlights any important keywords. This and all other amazing features make Lumen5 one of the great examples of a SaaS product.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the pioneer in the best example of SaaS. It offers businesses and individuals more than 150 services to help them grow their business. The services and tools offered by AWS are IoT, database, blockchain, machine learning, robotics, security, customer relationship management, business application, and much more. The best part about these services is that they all are available on the cloud. So, anyone can access them anywhere and anytime.
Amazon is the parent company of AWS, and it alone brings in a revenue of $25.6 billion with more than a million customers. AWS clientele includes many big tech giants (including SaaS companies) and businesses like Netflix, NASA, and Airbnb. If you’re looking for one SaaS company to follow? Then that is AWS, which offers many SaaS solutions and earns billions.
Squibler
Squibler is another example of an inspiring SaaS company that helps writers build stories. Squibler can be used on the browser, or you can install the app on any device. It enables authors to write stories faster thanks to its proprietary AI that gives pre-existing outlines. Squibler enables authors and screenplay writers to organize their notes. It also helps them to streamline their creative process.
A great feature of Squibler is the correction/editing it does to make sentences more active than passive and to fix spellings. Squibler is used by many popular news sites and magazines like Wired, Business Insider, and Good reads.
This list is not complete if we do not mention Google. It has one of the best SaaS and cloud services for both businesses and individuals. Most of these services are free and offer subscriptions to their users. The widely used Google SaaS product is the G-Suite. The G-Suite includes many cloud-based apps like Calendar, Hangouts, Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, Forms, and many more.
Google cloud-based SaaS apps are cost-friendly and help businesses to streamline their work through project management by collaborating and sharing files. G-Suite helps the workforce to share feedback and interact with its remote workers to organize their projects and tasks. For example, Google Meet allows you to have conference calls and share presentations. Whereas Google Drive stores all that data that you can later share or edit among your colleagues. G-Suite has active paying customers that are over 5 million and more than a billion active free users.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool for businesses and social media influencers to get their social marketing to the next level. It focuses on two primary functions: publishing and giving insights using analytics. It is effective for advertising agencies that handle multiple clients’ social accounts. With Buffer, you can add many social accounts and schedule multiple posts streamlining your work.
Buffer has been in the market for more than a decade with 75,000+ active customers. That is why Buffer makes it an inspiring SaaS example for businesses. Moreover, SaaS companies like Buffer are more likely to be acquired by social giants.
Canva
Canva is a SaaS design tool for designers and businesses to create amazing content primarily for digital. It has a user-friendly interface that lets you drag-and-drop elements like images, text, and graphics. You can choose from a vast library of templates to create your content. Canva has a template for blog post images, book covers, PowerPoint presentations, social media posts (Facebook, Instagram, Insta Stories), invitation cards, flyers/posters, and much more.
In Canva, you can edit, share, and save content. Canva is free to use, and you can save your content on the cloud that teams can access on the go. Canva offers both free and paid media for its users to choose from. In 2019 Canva had reported a revenue of $291 million and had 15 million-plus active users. Thus, making Canva a great example of a free-to-use SaaS company.
DocuSign
What are the best SaaS companies doing? They offer a great solution to the user. Such is another SaaS example, DocuSign that offers secure e-signature for its customers. It allows the customer to create and store their signature on the cloud that can be later accessed at any time and place.
Many freelancers and remote businesses use DocuSign to sign contracts and agreements. They have more than a million customers, and their clients include T-Mobile, Unilever, and Apple. This is a great inspiration for those who want to create a SaaS company, that a thing like signatures on a document can be a successful SaaS idea.
Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the first SaaS movers companies that shifted their application to the Cloud. Salesforce offers a Customer Relationship Management suite for businesses that collects, stores, analyzes, and monitors customer data. Thanks to its user-friendly dashboard businesses can use the CRM tool without the need for IT.
The best part of Salesforce is that they’re regularly updating their software and introducing new tools in marketing, sales, analytics, and customer engagement. Salesforce generates around $10 billion in revenue with more than 150K active users. Making it one of the largest SaaS companies around the world.
Slack
Our personal favorite, Slack is a business communication app intended for businesses with distributed teams. You get several IRC-type features in this platform, such as channels (or chat rooms). Slack is built to help all team members have real-time conversations, upload work material, and get a shared, consolidated over of purpose and progress. In SaaS terms, Slack is a business-to-business (B2B) software for businesses of all sizes.
Slack was introduced to the world in August 2013 and was the result of an international communication system developed by Steward Butterfield. Today, Slack offers various products for distance learning, sales, marketing, project management, remote working, and media companies.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, new SaaS startups are taking the big screen. Whether making content, sharing documents, or even taking e-signatures, they provide their clients with different products and strive to make their services easy to use. We hope that we were able to help you find inspiration to make your SaaS product.