I've thought about one of those ideas for a while: promise 6 months to highly motivated high school kids and for an exchange of working for two years at lower wages, you'd train them. Then, you could have them working for 20 hours a week fairly quickly on QA, automated testing, and other positions as they learn your system. Then, place them in a mentorship system with good senior engineers and keep the good ones.
This article made me give Zoho a try. We use Google Apps/37Signals, but wanted to kick the tires and see what's up at Zoho.
First impression is that they need UI polish, but overall the individual Zoho apps are astonishingly fast. I don't know how they'll hold up after loading data into them, but try out some of the Zoho Business apps in Chrome on OS X (use your OpenID so you don't have to sign in).
Is it just me? Performance seems so amazingly fast for just clicking around that I want to do a side-by-side benchmark with Selenium and some real data just to make sure my eyes aren't deceiving me.
Any thoughts on what other products can be done with this model? or in other words, what other SaaS products currently have fat margins that can be undercut?
not necessarily SaaS products, but I'm thinking of software for professionals:
- software for lawyers, accountants
- software for the health industry
- graphic software such as photoshop, 3DSMax or Final Cut pro
the overall market is smaller, but you can sell the software for more. Also might need a little bit more topical knowledge, but imho it's the same quantity of work as doing a Microsoft Office clone
another market with fat margins is MMO video games. I'm sure there are lots of niche markets out there wanting their own game
