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1/ We are at an exciting inflection pt. in history of business sw: the rise of the USER as key decision maker. This has profound implications for how sw co's get built and for the tooling (CRM, Mktg tools, prod. roadmap) that sw co's require to scale. https://medium.com/ideas-from-bain-capital-ventures/the-next-20-year-cycle-in-business-software-74f6e499df82
2/ My partner @kevinzhang and I break down the Three Key Pillars that best in class software companies will leverage in the future to create Billion dollar plus businesses.
3/ Pillar 1: user-centric products and distribution. While the last two cycles of software focused on the “economic buyers” the focus today is the user. Companies like @SlackHQ and @wrike have thrived from this bottom-up adoption driven by individuals and teams.
4/ User-centric products and software distribution benefit from community driven and bottom-up growth and the resulting hyper-efficient sales and marketing model:
5/ Pillar 2: modern monetization. The next wave of software monetization goes beyond the typical “per-seat” licensing model, moving to forms of revenue that are tied to usage, scale and consumption. These models are inherently more aligned with user-centricity.
6/ With marginal costs of sw essentially being close to zero (aside from hosting), new software companies will aggressively reduce base license fees to drive adoption and will look to these alternative monetization mechanisms to drive revenue and growth.
7/ And Pillar 3: building modern, global teams. Just as software companies are now born in the cloud, their tech and internal processes should also be web-native. With lower eng costs leveraging global labor pool, these sw cos can invest in faster prod development and output.
8/ The cost advantage of leveraging global software development is material and will quickly go from competitive advantage to competitive necessity:
9/ We are excited to partner with seed and Series A founders leveraging one or more of these pillars to build the next generation of sw cos. @BainCapVC
10/ We also are actively investing in the next gen tooling for a User centric world: CRM->URM (user rel. mgmt); Mktg Automation -> Community Engagement. Cust. Success-> User Engagement. Cust Support-> User Feedback and many more.
11/ Please reach out to any of the software partners at @BainCapVC @sasmith4 @stefancoh @EnriqueSalem @sfriend37 @aaref @kevinzhang
12/ Special thanks to @nrmehta @voxmatt and @J_Waldmann for their feedback, input, and comments on this post.
