evidence candidate goes to: this-edition E explorer
Users were never happy: 91% frustrated, 80% of features rarely or never used, $21 million a year in idle licences
Business software did 80% of what you needed and the remaining 20% was as painful as before you bought it, and it is measured: Freshworks found 91% of 8,698 people frustrated by inadequate workplace technology; Pendo found 80% of features in the average product rarely or never used, across 615 products; Zylo puts the average organisation's waste on unused licences at $21 million a year. 73% of companies prepare VAT returns in Excel and 78% of British companies say spreadsheets support key financial decisions: the persistence of Excel is the clearest evidence that SaaS failed them, because it is the one tool where they control the shape of the thing. You pay 100% for the 10% of features you actually wanted.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. The article rejects the famous Standish 64% (a 2002 keynote based on four internal applications) in favour of Pendo's sample. Why a founder's opening is in old, unloved software.
Where it comes from
- The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI First, the part nobody likes to say: users were never happy (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Be a founder answered written, Life Patterns
Where it goes
Chapter Be a founder: the expert founders, part Start the company (drafting); topic Be a founder (or a one-person service).
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Be a founder: the expert can build first now, and the test is whether they miss it, There is a company in this: a code review that reads every layer, for somebody to build, The expert founders, in numbers: 45 is the mean age, experience doubles the odds, a third of US startups have one founder, The SaaS apocalypse will be decided by inertia, not by AI, because AI is available to both sides, What SaaS refused to build to protect its moat is exactly what a customer's agent needs, A company sits in the two moves on the map: a guess becoming a product, and a product becoming a commodity.
Node idea:users-were-never-happy in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.