Horizontal Products
topic on 3 shows · 5 statements across 5 episodes
Startups For the Rest of Us 
Big Technology 
20VC
5 statements about Horizontal Products, every show
Levie: Vertical SaaS Proved $50B Companies Win Over Horizontal Tools
“Even in, you know, kind of Traditional SaaS software. We saw 30, 40, fifty billion dollar vertical software companies emerge in categories where there was already plenty of horizontal products that could have solved those problems, but just that relentless lev…”
Gonto: Template libraries matter most for user intent data, not utility
“So that's why I think building a template engine and templates library is key, not because of the templates that the user will receive and how fast they will act on it, but because they self-service, self-servicely give you a lot of information about who they …”
Reimer: Horizontal SaaS requires finding abstractions across vertical requests
“The trickiest part about building a horizontal product is that you're trying to look for the, what's the abstraction between
These kind of disparate requests that are sort of pointing to the same thing, but they're pointing to it in a different way. And can w…”
Lerner: Horizontal product ICPs are defined by attributes, not personas
“Horizontal products also have an ICP. This is, I love this one. I'm going to call this out even though you didn't ask. I think it's an important one for so many people. Horizontal products have an ICP because the true ICP should be defined in terms of attribut…”
Balfour: Activation is the primary growth constraint for horizontal SaaS
“Very commonly with the product we were talking about, Loom, which is like a horizontal product the constraint is activation, and the reason the constraint is activation is that the biggest strength of horizontal products is also its biggest weakness, is that i…”