Up Next: Crowd-sourced SaaS
Notice: This blog post was originally published on Indeni before its acquisition by BlueCat.
The content reflects the expertise and perspectives of the Indeni team at the time of writing. While some references may be outdated, the insights remain valuable. For the latest updates and solutions, explore the rest of our blog
Key takeawaysThis key takeaway was generated through LLMs crawling the page and coming up with an overview of the content.The article discusses Google’s new tool, The Customer Journey to Online Purchase, as an early example of a shift toward crowd-sourced, data-driven SaaS where services evolve by analyzing aggregated customer data. The author contrasts traditional data-visualization apps with next-generation SaaS that derives actionable insights from pooled customer data to continuously improve service value. The piece argues this evolution—called Data-Driven Applications by some—is the next software revolution, already appearing in startups and likely to be integrated into mainstream analytics platforms, with implications for product innovation and competitive advantage.
What is meant by 'crowd-sourced SaaS' in the article?
In the article, ‘crowd-sourced SaaS’ refers to software-as-a-service offerings that continuously evolve by collecting and analyzing the data stored by their customers as a whole. Unlike traditional SaaS that focuses on lowering cost and easing adoption, crowd-sourced SaaS extracts patterns and actionable insights from aggregated customer data to improve features, automate decisions, and deliver greater value to all customers. The emphasis is on turning data into knowledge that benefits users through ongoing service-level improvements, not merely on visualization or raw data access.
How does the author distinguish 'Data-Driven Applications' from typical data-visualization tools?
The author argues that the term ‘Data-Driven Applications’ is often misunderstood as tools for accessing and visualizing data, but the intended meaning is different: these applications use accumulated customer data to generate actionable insights that change the service itself. Rather than providing dashboards or reports, next-generation SaaS analyzes how similar customers use the product and applies that knowledge to improve features, recommend actions, or automate optimizations across the user base. The distinction is between passive presentation of data and active service evolution driven by learned patterns.
What real-world impact and examples does the article give for this new SaaS generation?
The article cites Google’s Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool and startups like RelateIQ and indeni as early indicators of the trend toward crowd-driven SaaS. It suggests real-world impact includes services that continually improve by learning from aggregated customer data—such as a CRM company analyzing collective customer records to provide smarter recommendations to all clients. The author believes this dimension of SaaS will drive the next software revolution, enhance product value beyond cost and usability, and eventually be integrated into mainstream analytics platforms.
Google released something today – a tool called The Customer Journey to Online Purchase. While this just a standalone tool at the moment, I’m sure we’ll witness parts of its capabilities integrated into Google Analytics at some point in the near future.
This release, together a few more startups dotting the landscape (like RelateIQ, as described by Scott Raney of Redpoint, or indeni, on whose blog this post appears) are heralding a new generation of SaaS: the crowd-sourced SaaS. Brian Ascher of Venrock calls it Data-Driven Applications, and so does Scott Raney. However, I believe that term is confusing. Data-Driven causes too many people to think about applications that let you access and visualize data and that’s not what we’re talking about here.
The next generation of SaaS is when the service provided to customers keeps evolving over time based on the data that is stored within it. What would happen if Salesforce.com collected all the data its customers store in its service, analyzes it and uses the results to provide more value to its own customers? indeni is a SFDC customer and I’m sure our data would greatly benefit from being analysed by an automated system that has seen how the data of other SaaS companies looks like. I’m not talking Jigsaw here. I’m talking actionable insights. The kind that derive from data being turned into knowledge.
You see, SaaS is no longer just about being cheaper and easier to use, which is what Salesforce.com started with and Brian Ascher details so well in his Forbes post. That revolution is done – it’s reality now. The question a lot of people are asking themselves is what is the next revolution in software and crowd-driven SaaS is my bet. My belief in it is so big, that I’ve bet my livelihood on it.
I’d be very interested to learn about others who are working on bringing us all to the next level. As with all revolutions that are just starting – it’s very difficult to find on Google who is doing it. We’ll need to go old-school and actually use word-of-mouth. So reach my on twitter: @yonadavl
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