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On first glance, SMB SaaS companies, those who sell Software-as-a-Service to small to medium businesses, may seem like any other software company. But they are quite a different breed. It’s not just the sales process that differs from traditional software. The entire business has be built differently. So must the product. And typically these products have a 2 step value proposition.

SMB SaaS companies sell to a radically different market than enterprise software companies. See the table below. The average traditional enterprise software company sells to firms with 3300 employees whose average payroll is $160M annually. In the US, there are only 17,500 of these firms. On the other hand, SMB SaaS companies sell to firms with 10 employees and $400k in annual payroll. There are about 5.8M of these firms in the US.

One of the main challenges I have faced working in venture capital is to find a consistent structured way of analyzing companies. The main goals in this analysis are comprehensiveness of the analysis, ease of replication across sectors and like startups, developing a minimally viable analysis for a first pass that can also serve as the foundation of a deeper analysis as an opportunity warrants.

Over the past 18 months, I’ve read tens of business books on strategy, business models, and analytical frameworks. And over the weekend, I read one particularly insightful book that put a capstone on my preferred collection of analyses: Business Model Generation. The book is crowdsourced from a collection of over 1,000 authors and provides a flexible framework for brainstorming, analyzing and comparing business models. It’s an invaluable resource to any entrepreneur and VC.