SaaS Trends for 2018  

Openview Labs has put together several trends for 2018. I thought that the prediction of a move away from lean products and minimum viable products was an interesting predicted trend. Less controversial but equally interesting is the prediction of continued private equity activity in the software M&A.

 

On December 15th new revenue recognition changes became effective which has an impact on subscription businesses such as SaaS. Subscription businesses are significantly affected because of the frequency of pricing changes, the complexity of packages, usage based pricing among other reasons.

This is one of the reasons that I always recommend that a SaaS company use a separate packaging and pricing tool. This allows rapid response to market changes by allowing the pricing and packaging to be done independent of development engineering allowing development to focus on the product functionality and customer experience. It also allows quick and accurate response to changes such as the revenue recognition changes above without impacting the product roadmap.