Empathy

There was a good Twitter thread the other day that started because Sam Mendelsohn suggested that SaaS vendors should have to run a DTC brand.

While I disagree with this in practice, I love the spirit of it and I actually think it highlights an opportunity for SaaS: Empathy. In short, there’s too little of it—and if you have it, you can overcome not running a DTC brand.

In fact, it might be even better.

Running a brand means you have a single point of view on solving a problem. Running a SaaS company means you get presented with dozens of points of view on solving a problem any time you talk to customers. Which one is best? Which one works for the most number of brands? Which one can be modified to work with even more?

These are the types of questions SaaS companies get to ask and answer, and doing so can create a much better solution than the one a brand might come up with on its own.

It is, really, why ecommerce-enablement SaaS became a market after all: Brands have a core competency, and it is often not building software. They know their problems intimately, and they can often solve them (DTC brands are scrappy!). But they can’t solve all of them, because there’s an opportunity cost to doing so (the more they solve their problems, the less they focus on their product). SaaS vendors, on the other hand, have a complementary core competency, and it’s being adept at solving problems.

But that only happens when a SaaS vendor is willing to invest in understanding its customers.

As generative AI gets infused into more and more workflows, that empathy is going to matter a lot more. A strong point-of-view on how to do something is the best way to improve prompts, for example, and it will matter much more when it comes to automated workflows.

Those who take the time to understand will be the ones who deliver the most value.

You don’t need to run a brand for that. You actually have to do a lot more. And I’m betting on Stamped being one of those vendors.