Fantasy Football and Web Applications

I think the biggest mistake people make when looking at Web Applications and SaaS is thinking that's about just moving users over from siloed enterprise applications. This just scratches the surface.

I'm a long time fantasy football player (16 years now.) When we started our league we all used to get up early on Monday morning to get the stats out of the paper and manually calculate our results and phone them in to the commissioner. We were dedicated buyers on fantasy football magazines. Eventually we found some desktop software from an ad in one of the magazines and used that to start managing our league.

When fantasy football came on-line and we were able to put our league on CBS Sportsline's Commission.com it was a revelation. We were able to configure our league exactly like we wanted and get realtime stats and draft and trade our players much more easily than we ever thought possible. We even stopped having our draft at the local pizza joint so we could go to someones house and connect to the internet with the draft attendees from all over the country (though we are now back at Vito's in Sunnyvale since they added wireless.)

Soon every fantasy football league in existence went on-line. I don't think there has been an off-line league anywhere in the country. A web application made our lives so much easier.

But was have been even more amazing is to see the explosion of popularity in these fantasy leagues since the advent of the web. What used to be a highly targeted sport's fan/geek niche has become a much more main stream pastime. No longer is participation limited to 40 year old losers like myself going out and buying the football magazines. In our office, almost everyone has some sort of team.

Good web applications have a way of doing that. They convert not just existing users but broadening the scope of who uses them. eBay took collectibles out of dust shops and fan mags to the masses. Salesforce.com has brought CRM out of the Fortune 500. It will be interesting to see what is next.

What do you mean I can’t “Click-To-Buy” your Software!?!

I just got back from the Tier 1 SaaS Evolution Summit, where I saw a presentation by Mike Mankowski of Tier 1. He had one statistic that floored me; that only 13% of Software as a Service companies had click-to-buy functionality on their site. Delivering as many SaaS apps as we do, I knew a number of them didn’t allow users to subscribe directly from their site, but I had no idea it was 87%!

While Mike was quick to point out that research was preliminary, I think it’s amazing indication that many SaaS companies are not truly understanding what it means to be On-Demand. It’s not enough to offer your software on the web and charge a subscription, you need to make it simple to adopt and get started. Not having a “click-to-buy” feature tells your users that they are going to need your help to get going and make their software work. That sounds a lot like bad old Enterprise Software.

Besides “Click-To-Buy” offers great advantages for the SaaS company. Not only does it greatly reduce your customer acquisition cost, it forces your team to simplify your message and clarify your primary value to a user. You may not be able to sell a complete and complex suite of tools over the net, but if you have “Click-To-Buy” you can get to a point where people can get going. Once they are using your software, then you go in for the complex sale.

From here out, I’m going to ask every SaaS company I meet if they have “Click-To-Buy,” and if not how soon they will have it. You can't be Business Web if you don't allow people to do business with you on the web.