Inspiration from SaaS businesses that gave themselves constraints

For my current Apple Developer Academy assignment I’m researching co-working spaces in Bali and the businesses that use them. We have narrowed down where we want to focus on marketing so I want highlight some of the SaaS products I know of or have even used to run my previous business. These are SaaS that resonated with me for differentiating in a crowded market.

Opinionated SaaS

This will be a pimple list with some comments:

Superhuman Email - Originally their value proposition was that you could get to inbox zero faster than any other email client and even though they only worked with gmail accounts on iOS, because they embraced the constraint of the app having no more of a 200 millisecond response time they could charge 30USD a month. Recently they were acquired by Grammerly. Their go-to-market was through VCs and startup founders.
Pipedrive - This is a sales CRM that I found simple enough for creating a sales pipeline customized for your sales process. By adopting this I was able to compare my sales teams performance and try to find common objections from potential clients. It also helped make sure that the sales team didn’t forget to followup with a client and if one left I still had all the contacts.
Linear - When every company was using Jira and rolling out “Agile”, Linear came out from YC targeting startups with great design and local first design and keyboard shortcuts that made it fast to interact with and process your work. Now, with the advent of agents they have embraced that and are reinventing themselves because issue tracking. They got early traction through YC startups.
Mesh - Started out as a personal CRM that brought together contacts from your iPhone address book and enriched them with other online information. Integrated with LinkedIn, Instagram and other social services to import contacts and deduplicate them into one record. Added functions to remind you to keep in touch periodically really got me interested. As you helped to merge your database they were building a shadow public database of public profiles like Brent Deverman’s Mesh Profile I think in order to unseat LinkedIn. They were eventually bought by the company that owns Wordpress.com (Automatic).
Notion - Became well known for flexible knowledge management functions and flexibly creating databases based off notes. Now adding on agents to help collaborate and sift through all the unstructured data.
Rosie - Adding this small business idea that is enabled by AI to help take calls and respond to simple business inquires using voice AI. Small businesses can use this to not miss calls. I think they are pretty good at tuning their marketing funnel so it is good to look at their website.

Super SaaS: Everything Apps

Here are some other SaaS products that are maybe not as differentiated but have become common and popular which might have APIs we could tap into. Some of these are more business operating systems:

Odoo - Covers all major parts of a business including marketing, sales, HR, supply chain and operations. I just realized that they are open source so that seems how they differentiated themselves. They have a mobile [application maybe just for iPad](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/odoo/id1272543640
Odoo) but it looks pretty sad.
Zoho - Business suite that covers CRM, sales pipeline, ERP and many more. Seems they have built multiple mobile apps for some of their functions.
Clickup - Focuses on project management for teams. They seem to have an actively updated mobile app.

Many of the above are trying to bundle what used to be multiple SaaS services together because companies might want to have less SaaS tools.