GoFreight Growth Notes: How Vertical SaaS Sweeps the World
Every year brings a new startup craze and a new narrative for hot money to chase. Market corrections are often the best chance to look past hype and focus on companies building real foundations.
- Hank
- 4 min read
English Version (中文版本在下方)
Every year brings a new startup wave, and the market always searches for the next narrative while hot money rushes in. From the Metaverse to Crypto, these buzzwords have been pushed by investors and the media into eye-catching valuations and polished stories. The recent market drawdown is a good chance to cool the market down and take a closer look at companies that are quietly building solid foundations instead of simply sitting at the peak of the hype cycle.
The Essence of SaaS Is Service
SaaS literally means Software as a Service. Many people assume the important part is the software, but the more important part is the service. Software is the scalable delivery mechanism. Technology is the accelerator. The real deciding factor is whether the company can deliver a service users genuinely value.
Vertical SaaS Is Entering an Explosive Growth Phase
Within the broader SaaS world, Vertical SaaS is a particularly interesting category. In the United States it is a major area of focus for top investment firms such as A16z and Bessemer Venture Partners. In just the past decade, the market value of Vertical SaaS companies has grown from USD 71B to USD 650B, almost a tenfold increase.
Vertical SaaS refers to a software business model focused on serving a specific industry. Its distinctive strength is that, instead of offering services across many industries, Vertical SaaS companies focus deeply on a single industry and continue expanding to meet all of that industry’s needs. For a more detailed explanation, you can read an earlier article by our CEO Trenton.
The Path to Monopoly
Peter Thiel argued in Zero to One that what matters is not competition but monopoly. Competition pushes firms to imitate one another and destroys margins. Monopoly allows companies to focus on doing the right things and keep driving the world forward.
In Vertical SaaS, dominant market position is more common because the company can build highly specialized features for one customer segment and capture a very large share of that niche. It can then layer in more products such as payments, lending, or payroll to keep expanding user value inside the same vertical.
In Vertical SaaS, there are three main ways to become the market leader:
1. Target underserved markets: Shopify, ServiceTitan, Procore
2. Solve overlooked problems: nCino
3. Replace existing incumbents: Toast
For more detail, BVP has a strong article on the lessons of a decade of investing in Vertical Software.
The Underserved Freight Forwarding Market
From day one, GoFreight chose to focus on the freight forwarding market, a large industry that lacked modern technology and remained underserved. We believe technology can help freight forwarders run their complicated day-to-day work far more simply.
Freight forwarders act as the bridge between companies that need to move goods and the shipping lines that actually transport them. They lease container space from shipping lines, then split and resell that capacity to companies that need cargo moved, making it easier and more efficient for everyone involved.
Their work is clearly complex and time-consuming, full of difficult pain points, yet for a long time the world largely ignored them. Before COVID, most people took logistics and stable supply chains for granted. Only when the pandemic triggered shipping disruptions and supply chain breakdowns did the world begin to grasp how indispensable logistics really is, and how large the opportunity is inside it. The global freight forwarding market was close to USD 200B in 2021. GoFreight became one of the few early players that had already gone deep into the industry before the mainstream market fully noticed.
About GoFreight
The most important feature of Vertical SaaS is deep customer understanding and industry-specific problem solving. That is why GoFreight currently runs in a hybrid model: the sales team is in the United States, the product team is in Taiwan, and over 90 percent of our customers are in North America. We want to iterate quickly based on the closest possible feedback from the market.
We believe Taiwan’s technology talent is capable of competing on the world stage. That is why we actively recruit outstanding people in Taiwan and hope to prove that a startup founded from Taiwan can play in the global league and win.
We Are Hiring! Come and Join Us!
https://www.yourator.co/companies/HardCoreTechnology
GoFreight 成長日記：Vertical SaaS 如何席捲全球？
中文版本
每年都有許多新的創業風潮湧現，市場總會找尋新的風口而熱錢則蜂擁而至，從 Metaverse 到 Crypto ，這些 Buzzword 在投資人和媒體的推波助瀾下相繼獲得新高的估值，成就光鮮亮麗的故事。而近期整體市場的崩跌（或是說校正回歸?），正好能讓過熱的市場冷靜下來，好好審視更多不同型態的公司，關注穩健打好地基的企業，而非僅聚焦在 Hype Cycle 的頂峰。
SaaS 的本質是服務
SaaS（Software-as-a-Service）公司在五年前還是市場炙手可熱的當紅炸子雞，許多人可能對其並不陌生，近幾年上市的軟體公司也不乏 SaaS 公司的身影。SaaS 直翻中文為軟體即服務，顧名思義是使用軟體科技提供服務，許多人會誤會其中的關鍵在於軟體，但事實上更重要的是服務。軟體是種快速規模化的手段，科技進步則是催化劑，但如何提供滿足使用者的服務才是市場是否買單的關鍵。
Vertical SaaS 迎來爆發式增長
而其中 Vertical SaaS 更是 SaaS 產業中較為特別的存在，大部分的人可能並未聽過 Vertical SaaS，但在美國此種類型的公司卻是許多頂級投資機構重點關注的領域，如投資過 Facebook, Airbnb, Slack 的 A16z，和參與過 Shopify, Linkedin, Twitch 投資的 Bessemer Venture Partners 都曾專文討論 Vertical SaaS 在其垂直領域的優勢和潛力，僅僅在過去十年，Vertical SaaS 公司的市值便從 USD$71B 成長至 USD$650B，將近十倍的爆發式增長。
簡單來說，Vertical SaaS 或是 Vertical Software 指的便是在一特定垂直領域提供軟體服務的商業模式，其獨特之處在於，相較大多數公司提供服務給予跨產業的客戶，Vertical SaaS 則專注提供服務給予單一產業的用戶，並持續滿足他們的所有需求。更詳細的解說可以參考我們執行長 Trenton 之前寫過的文章，深入潛出的介紹了 Vertical SaaS 的機會與挑戰。
獨佔市場的途徑
Peter Thiel，Paypal 和 Palantir 的創辦人，Facebook 第一位外部投資人。他的知名著作「從 0 到 1」（好書，非常推薦！）中曾經提到，相較於競爭，他關注的是獨佔，競爭會使人彼此模仿並侵蝕利潤，只有獨佔才能夠讓企業專注做正確的事情並持續推動世界進步。
在大多數產業，要達到獨佔非常困難，因為會有過多的挑戰者，各產品間的差異化可能也不夠明顯，但在 Vertical SaaS，獨佔卻是市場的常態。由於專注於單一市場的客戶，Vertical SaaS 能夠開發特化功能並搶占超過 50% 的市場份額，並透過持續增加的新功能，如支付、借貸、員工薪資，以彌補單一市場侷限的天花板，並最大化用戶價值。
而在 Vertical SaaS 中，要取得市場領導地位有三條途徑：
1. 瞄準服務不足的市場: Shopify (USD$50.67B), ServiceTitan (USD$18B), Procore (USD$6.4B)
2. 解決被忽視的問題: nCino (USD$3.52B)
3. 取代現有企業的地位: Toast (USD$7.66B)
更詳細的研究可參考前面也有提到的創投機構 BVP 近期所發表的文章
服務不足的貨運承攬市場
GoFreight 從成立的第一天便瞄準缺乏進步科技且服務不足的貨運承攬市場，我們希望透過科技的輔助讓**貨運承攬業者（Freight Forwarder）**能夠更簡單的運行繁複的日常工作。貨運承攬業者可以被理解為有運貨需求的公司與實際運貨的船公司之間的橋樑，他們會先將船公司的貨櫃承租下來再分租給需要運貨的各家公司，以湊齊貨櫃的空間，並節省需要運貨公司與船公司需要來回往返的金錢與時間。
很明顯地，他們工作十分複雜且耗時，過程中充滿許多的困難點，但他們卻長時間被世界所忽略。在這次新冠疫情之前，大部分的人將運輸物流和穩定的供應鏈視為理所當然，直到疫情造成的運輸問題和斷鏈危機，世界才開始意識到物流業之於現代生活有多麼不可或缺，並發現潛藏其中的巨大商機（據統計整體貨運承攬市場在2021年將近USD$200B），而 GoFreight 也成為少數先於主流市場便深耕此行業的先行者。
關於 GoFreight
如同先前所述，Vertical SaaS 最重要的特點來自於了解客戶，並為單一產業的客戶提供解決方案。因此 GoFreight 目前採取 Hybrid 的工作型態，銷售團隊在美國，而產品部門位於台灣，客戶佔比超過 90% 是北美客戶，我們希望透過最接近市場的第一反饋，快速迭代出貼近用戶的產品。
我們相信台灣的科技研發能力具有登上世界級舞台的條件，因此我們積極地網羅台灣的優秀人才，希望藉由多家矽谷頂尖投資機構的寶貴經驗（我們最近剛獲得來自矽谷 VC 的 A 輪融資），以及國際化團隊的執行力，搭起台灣與矽谷乃至於全世界的橋樑，證明台灣出發的新創企業也可以打世界盃，並且能夠贏球！