SaaS tools, malware, platform integration – businesses in today’s world need to stay on top of a dizzying array of technologies, all of which develop new functionality at such a pace it makes you wonder how small enterprises can possibly keep up. Subscribe Technologies (CNSX:SAAS) is fully aware of that challenge and has an answer in the form of a cost-effective services suite that covers pretty much every digital need a small- to medium-sized firm could have.
Subscribe Technologies is headed by public markets veteran Paul Dickson, a perfect fit given his background in software development spanning some 30 years. Dickson believes that Software-as-a-Service is just getting underway and that all software programs will soon run independently of our personal computer hardware, residing and functioning in the increasingly pervasive “cloud”.
“It ties in perfectly with all of the AI (Artificial Intelligence) advancements taking place, where SAAS applications are being developed with AI in the back end that ups the ability to analyze client data,” Dickson explains. “Nobody is going to run software on their computers locally in the near future. It is all going to be in the cloud.”
Established as a company less than a year ago (December 2016), Subscribe Technologies already has a set of product offerings ranging from accounting and sales software to a security platform for analyzing websites and an alternative to the famous Dropbox filing sharing service that Dickson says comes with fewer restrictions for users.
And that concept is the key to understanding how Subscribe Technologies intends to prosper over time. The idea is not to take on Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) or Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) on their home turf, but to offer alternative software to businesses and businesspeople who find that incumbent products don’t fit the bill for them, often because they are too restrictive. Maintaining high functionality at a reasonable cost is the other pillar of the strategy.
As reflected in the company’s name, the cost side of the equation from a customer perspective involves subscribing to use the software and paying a monthly fee. Dickson says that because the targeted customer base is small- to medium-sized entities the monthly cost starts around $10.00, thus hardly requiring a potential user to engage in a make-or-break decision from a financial commitment standpoint.
Working with the company’s chief engineer in Victoria, British Columbia, and supported by a team of software developers in India, Dickson has developed, or acquired and refined, a number of products that were made available for subscription in the past few months.
The first to hit the market was bContact.com, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform featuring both accounting and sales functionality.
“bContact.com is a fully integrated SaaS platform that performs invoicing, collections, reporting, billing and other functions so customers can essentially run their entire small business from any web browser,” Dickson says. “bContact.com is really the ultimate tool for managing your entire business back-end.”
The aforementioned Dropbox alternative comes in the form of a product named FileQ.com.
“With FileQ we wanted to offer a service that had fewer restrictions, as some of the most popular file sharing systems force users to sign up in order to access certain features,” says Dickson. “FileQ allows the user to share files freely with anyone and even plays video files with its integrated media player. Instead of paying a flat fee each month, the uploader of the files pays according to how much storage they require.”
The service most recently debuted is SiteSafe.io, which helps system administrators reduce the chance of having their website infected with malicious code. “SiteSafe is something we came up with to address issues that individual websites are having, as the hacking going on is relentless these days,” states Dickson. “It is definitely good practice to scan your own website for malware, or if you host other websites then you should scan the client websites.”
Sitesafe looks for viruses, worms, trojans and other malware, liaising with a third-party database that is constantly updated to both detect and eliminate programs designed to steal information, interfere with website performance, or worse. In the spirit of keeping things affordable, SiteSafe can be accessed to monitor a site for a monthly price of between $5.95 and $19.95.
Subscribe has other product offerings available as well, and Dickson says that there are more on the way. From a valuation standpoint, the company aims over time to build a reasonable base of recurring revenue and, eventually, profit. But given the value ascribed to some software programs these days, there is also the possibility that a Subscribe product gets hot and hits it out of the park.
As the products available to date have only just been introduced, marketing efforts have thus far been modest, and Subscribe is currently formulating a full-fledged marketing program that will utilize both keyword advertising and affiliate marketing, the latter enabling customers to earn money by referring others to use Subscribe services.
“Pretty much every SaaS company now has a referral program that pays people credits or cash for helping to obtain registered users,” Dickson explains. “The cost of acquisition can be high with online ads, where you are paying and hoping that people click. These days you do some of that, but also recruit others to market your product.”
One can’t deny that Subscribe has positioned itself to go after a huge market. Forecasts for the future size of the SaaS space begin in the tens of billions of dollars and run into the hundreds of billions. To settle on a particular number would be to miss the point – business spending on SaaS is big and getting bigger, and Subscribe need only capture a small piece to make a big difference to its bottom line.
“All we are trying to do is pick up a portion of the people who don’t want to use Dropbox, Salesforce, and the like,” says Dickson. “There is a great deal of business out there, and because there are others in the space capitalizing on this opportunity as well, that’s why we are establishing Subscribe as a multi-faceted SaaS company. In the months ahead, you’ll be seeing us meet a lot of our user targets and bringing new products to market.”
This story was originally published at www.proactiveinvestors.com on August 28, 2017 and featured in The CSE Quarterly.
Learn more about Deveron UAS at http://www.subscribetech.com/ and on the CSE website at http://thecse.com/en/listings/technology/subscribe-technologies-inc.