First, I'd like to thank Robert for his kind comments about SaaS University; we work hard to put on a very content filled event. Also, I'd like to remind readers of this blog that our early bird pricing for our events is $795; also, at every event, we give away to all the attendees a free copy of one our research reports and we charge for these. At Chicago every attendee received a copy of our massive SaaS Marketing Report, which breaks out 22 separate marketing activities as carried out by SaaS firms. We charge $449 for it. At Dallas, we gave away our direct sales compensation guide, which has a $400 price tag. These items are not loss leaders and are sold on a regular basis. Our events are designed to be very content rich and we think we're offering excellent value for the money.

Also, we videotape the entire proceedings and make them available online to the attendees, so, for example while Robert wasn't able to see all of Ted's channel discussion at the event, he will be able to when the video is posted online.

Now, as the issue of customer service. We have had speakers at past events discuss, specifically, SaaS customer service issues. For example, at Chicago, we had Matthew Gonnering of Widen address this topic specifically and in Atlanta and Boston Tom Appleton of DreamFactory.

rick chapman
http://www.softletter.com
http://www.saasuniversity.com

However, at Dallas, we decided to focus on the topic of understanding that your SaaS customer base needs to be thought of as a community of users based on the inherent nature of the SaaS model. Patrick's presentation went way beyond the issue of having customers pay for new features and discussed the community of users concept in greater detail.

Once you understand the power of this concept (and implement it), you should also begin to think about how you provide customer support in different ways. For example, Patrick discussed how the Plex community has “taken over” the management of Plex's documentation and FAQs. Ultimately, your community becomes a highly self supporting, and self managing entity that a SaaS company truly “reports” to.

By definition, not forking the code means the feature can be available to everyone if you so choose.

There are however some pitfalls with this approach- it could feel like you're in the custom software business and lose focus on product / market fit if you're not careful.

But if you're a small SaaS company, working in a tight vertical, design the new functionality carefully so to enhance your product/market fit, there is little downside to this approach, especially as the customer is tied in even more to your system…

I don't know exactly how much Plex is charging their customers, but it's not trivial. The basic idea is that if a customer wants a specific feature or function, Plex gives them a quote for it and then they decide if they want to pay for it or not. The interesting thing is that once the feature is done, it's available to all of their other customers as well (for no additional charge).

It's a great model if you can get your customers to buy into it, and Plex clearly has. I don't think it would work in a broader market, but it does appear to work in their tight vertical and I can see why.

Robert