“If you can buy it, don’t build it”
Over the past few years, the proliferation of SaaS products has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry to both start a company and beginning selling globally.
According to a new study from Stripe (above), 64 per cent of startups said they could not of have launched their company from Singapore even five years ago.
These tools are well known brands like Talenox for HR, Trello for collaboration and Mailchimp for marketing.
The top five such products used by Singaporeans, according to the survey, is as follows:
- Slack (internal communication)
- Stripe (payments)
- Google Analytics (analytics)
- AWS (hosting)
- GitHub (code)
63 per cent of startups used the tools above, which means this new generation of startups is essentially powered by these new SaaS tools.
In attendance was Li Hongyi, the son of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and GovTech employee. He touched on on of the major themes of the announcement event, which was, ‘if you can buy it, don’t build it’.
“If you build it, you are going to have invest resources [in some manner]. The people who spend all their time doing this, they do the tech on mass production for mass market, and they spend a lot more time thinking about this than you do.”
“By the time you have built to that level, they have probably moved on and are thinking of a thousand different things. Use the work that other people have done as much as possible,” he said.
Statistically, he is correct. 93 per cent of respondents said these tools made starting a company more affordable, while 97 per cent said they made it easier to launch a tech startup.
That being said, Gillian Tee, the Co-founder and CEO of Homage, cautioned startups against simply rushing into SaaS integration. She cited the costs of making errors, especially if the tool is a poor fit for the business model.
“From my standpoint, it goes back into what particular use cases you are looking at within your organisation,” she said.
One of the positive results of the Startup Stack is that companies can sell globally almost from the start. According to the study, 35 per cent of startups launched in the past year are already selling their products internationally and in total, 60 per cent of Singaporean startups are selling outside of the city.
Furthermore, 94 per cent of startups said the tools sped up the process of going global from Singapore.
Next time someone brings up the fact that “It is easier than ever to start a company”, these are the specifics they are referring to.
The Startup Stack not only makes it cheaper and easier to start a company, it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for founding a company.
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