It has been the case that in the digital age, a lot of things that used to happen offline are now also happening online also.

We can say that for meetings, calls, collaboration for documents, things like that.

So, these things that used to happen in offline or physical medium, they had their own tools and that made them very easy to do. And of course, they had their own limitations.

But when we migrated a lot of those activities to online medium, software has helped us a lot and they brought in a lot of features and maybe even created new ones.

But there is still a gap where a lot of the conveniences and control that used to exist in the offline medium have not been migrated to the online medium. And that is an opportunity for SaaS.

So, the key is to first identify which activities which were exclusively offline before and were high value are now also being done online and then check out the feature parity and whichever ones we can address so that we can make a software as a service out of it.

The activities being offline and valuable imply that there is a monetary incentive to support those and there might be industry just doing that and when those are migrated to online mediums. There is a possibility that not all of those conveniences have been migrated.

Examples of this could be special effects. Back in the day when they were just using physical format, there were a lot of prop companies, a lot of artists that were helping with those things.

But then came the digital medium when we tried to migrate all those things to digital medium and now we have hundreds of plugins, 10s of softwares and a lot of Info products helping you to do that in digital medium.

And it is not uncommon to see Youtubers making many many plugins that help you address the gaps that exist in current software that would have been possible to do in physical medium.

If something was valuable enough to support entire offline industries, the underlying need is validated

And if the there is a feature disparity then users already understand the problem because they experienced the offline solution

Also, the feature being offline implies that it is not something Supernatural or very technical or extraordinary. It is something you can easily replicate using software.

TLDR :

Activities that supported offline industries have validated, high-value user needs. When migrating online, if the full spectrum of convenience, control, or capability from the offline experience isn’t replicated, a significant SaaS opportunity exists