Software Products Wishful List - 2020 Version

January 7, 2020    saas lowcode

Elad Gill is a well known technology executive and angel investor. He has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they’ve grown from small companies into global brands. He has just posted a wish list of products for 2020. I particularly liked his software wish list, which is what I’ve been noting too for the last six months:

Global 2000 company IT needs.

Silicon Valley enterprise startups often focus on the needs of other mid-stage tech companies as customers, rather than the large enterprises that make up much of the business world by revenue. There are probably a dozen $10B+ enterprise software companies to build that are unique to the largest companies of the world that most Silicon Valley founders are never exposed to (UIPath is a good example of a company serving such a need).

I would love to see the following analysis:

  • A map of repetitious tasks, spreadsheets, and manual data extraction by function in the Fortune 500.

  • Budget breakdown of current software spend, by function, by line, in the Fortune 500.

  • A view of what Accenture, CapGemini, and Deloitte keep building over and over for large enterprises. Undoubtedly a subset of these custom consulting projects can be turned into SaaS software.

  • A tougher analysis to do is to ask what internal software projects various tech companies are working on. If you can get the list from 3-4 companies, you will undoubtedly see a few internal tool or product examples that should be built as a SaaS product for everyone.

More RPA and NoCode.

RPA (basically tools anyone can use to create programmatic APIs on top of legacy software) and NoCode/LowCode (letting anyone build an app with a spreadsheet as a database representation) are the biggest shifts in enterprise software since the cloud. In a few years, aspects of RPA and NoCode are likely to be incorporated into an increasing proportion of enterprise applications as a standard tool set. While the early leading apps of this area (e.g. UIPath, Airtable, …) make great headways, additional players like Notion, Parabola, Retool, and Simpo continue to take on additional uses cases. There is a lot more room for new players tackling specific use cases or verticals, or add on apps like Rossum or Instabase for NLP and data extraction into NoCode tables and apps like Airtable, or RPA apps like UIPath.

NoCode and RPA are likely to become more verticalized in terms of both function that uses them, and market served. More companies in these markets will emerge in 2020 and beyond.