Back when I was at a largish company as an engineering manager I had to negotiate these sorts of contracts all the time. Would have paid for this in a heartbeat. You guys are definitely on to something.
We eventually had an in-house person do it and they didn't love managing it either. The hardest part of their job honestly was tracking all the ones we had, ensuring we renewed on time, and talking to the procurement department to get everything squared away. When we had to move off credit cards to more corporate billing it was a nightmare to update everything.
And even when it was all buttoned up I still had to review that list quarterly to ensure we could drop old stuff, maintain which team(s) owned what service from the technical side, etc.
Next time I'm at a bigger company I'm using you for sure.
Interesting! Have you bought and sold between any two of your customers? For example, have you bought a GitHub enterprise license for InVision, and procured InVision for GitHub?
It is not clear how Vendr avoids the conflict of interest when negotiating.
How much of the value provided here is by combining the custom offer information given to each of your customers into one pool to use as leverage against the individual suppliers?
Also, wouldn't the customer sharing that pricing information with you violate some (most? all?) NDAs?
This is awesome. Even at a small/mid size startup we struggled with buying software. Wasting so much time across the board from engineering, engineering management, analyst and finance. Brillaint pain point to solve.
> We make money via a monthly subscription to buy and renew all of the SaaS in your stack.
I find this a bit ironic. To solve the pain of purchasing SAAS, you need to subscribe to a SAAS. Additionally, I think it would be much more convincing if you offered an option in which there's a small upfront fee (or even none) and then you make money on how much you can make your client save.
A couple questions came to mind:
1) "ranges from $2k-10k+" -- What is the smallest company size for which you anticipate delivering a positive ROI on those fees vs. the time spent handling purchasing on their own?
2) Do you handle purchasing of non-SaaS software?
My father once told me - if one of my sons was a drug dealer and the other was in procurement, I'm not sure which one I'd be more disappointed in.
Is that what SHI does?
If yes, hope you can do better than them. As a product owner, I've been working with many resellers and most of time it's not worth it.
Do you negotiate for marketplace apps also? Like Slack apps, Github apps, etc. or is that too small fries for this?
But who manages renewing Vendr’s subscription? Lol, just messing. Great idea!
Nice. Vendor reviews too? Or do you integrate with other vendors who perform said reviews (e.g. Whistic)?
I don’t know anything about this space or problem but I like this pitch. Good luck.
Can you partner up with F5 ASAP? The pain! (Insert Spock or Dune meme here)
Do you protect/mask the identity of your clients?
Have you talked to any government agencies about using this for larger, public sector, software procurements? I've worked for a govt software vendor in the law enforcement space for a few years, and it's very difficult to actually sell anything real, because the clients don't understand anything and fall for every single marketing/sales tactic from the big vendors. If there were a technically knowledgable middle-man company involved, it would actually be a huge boon for my company because we could focus more resources on building good product that the middleman would understand is better for the client versus fighting the legacy vendors with big marketing budgets and very low engineering support/talent.