The Software as a Service model, in large part because of it's name, has incorrectly led a lot of people to believe there's a fantasy universe that exists where they can light up some code, sit back, and collect some of that elusive passive income.

It's a ridiculous notion that needs to be shot in the face.

I know people questioning promising businesses because they're worried about the fact that there are humans involved with the running of the business. It's becoming an epidemic in the software industry that people think the goal is to reach some finish line where they can sit back and collect cash and have nothing running their company but a few servers.

It's insanity.

Moving forward, to me, my company and anyone that works with us, SaaS stands for Software and amazing Service. They cannot and they should not be separated.

Amazing service is server uptime. It's rapid fixes to bugs. It's responding to customer requests quickly. It's building new features that you know your customers want, it's experimenting, it's trying things, breaking things and trying again.

Too many people in our industry have built once solid products that have become stale (not simple, stale) and have not advanced with the web in the way they should have. The worst culprits are bootstrappers who got a taste of victory and instead of working their asses off while they were gaining momentum had the delusional thought that they could sit back and collect monthly payments forever.

And then they learned about a thing called churn.

If you're not willing to get into the services business, don't bother getting in the software business.

The SaaS model only works for companies that understand that the software can only provide so much service.