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The SaaSification Of Consumer

The phrase “consumerization of the enterprise” feels a bit tired, but certainly has merit as it applies to consumer design and strategies to infiltrate larger organizations. Lately, I’ve noticed something taking afoot with entrepreneurs, especially those who are building local, mobile service offerings — they’re offering their customers a new service (like ClassPass) but slapping on a subscription model at the end. No more piecemeal transactions. This has been on my mind for a few days, and finally had the time think through why this is happening:

  1. Investors are tired of piecemeal transactions: I could rattle off 10s and 10s of consumer startups which were either p2p or some distributed model where the company had to grind out transactions (usually for physical goods), and things went ok for a while and then just tapped out and flattened. Unless there’s one transaction a week (at minimum), ideally looking for 2-3 per day (hence, food) it seems investors would rather back models like Spotify where the consumer feels he/she cannot live without the service and charge on a monthly basis.
  2. Subscriptions enable bundling: Every businessperson loves a good excuse to bundle. If done correctly, the consumer pays extra for they actually use, even though they have the right to use more. Startups can then also tweak the pricing and tiers to offer specific bundles and create even more options around how to segment customers, thereby (theoretically) extracting the most revenue from them.
  3. Consumers demonstrating a willingness to subscribe: And, maybe investors are pushing this a bit, but well, consumers are responding. Look at ClassPass, growing like a weed and not even yet two years old. Rather then offering freemium models, these startups are just going right for the monthly or annual subscription. Maybe it’s that these early services are focused on cities and customers with disposable incomes. That is certainly a factor for why it’s being adopted. (For instance, I pay a monthly fee to Gmail, Dropbox, Boomerang, Sanebox, HelloSign, Spotify, Netflix, etc….I now wonder if any individual transaction that I make is on the table for a “subscription bundle.”
  4. Consumers also willing to pay more for convenience of subscription: My theory is that having the subscription, even if it may cost a bit more, reducing the cognitive load for customers to not be burdened with each transaction piling up. It removes that disincentive and in turn creates loyalty to the service.
  5. Subscriptions fit nicely with services versus most physical goods: I have been forced to try some physical products on a subscription. I get why they do it, I’m sympathetic to that. But, I rarely end up needing it. As a service, though, it’s easier to subscribe and know that I could use a service once in a month, or maybe 5x that month. It’s nice to not have to think about that.