Business Models

Horizontal SaaS

SaaS products designed to serve a broad range of industries with a common need, such as project management or CRM.

Horizontal SaaS products solve universal business problems — communication, project tracking, invoicing, HR — that exist across nearly every industry. The TAM is enormous because the customer could be any company in any sector. The tradeoff is intense competition: the product must be excellent enough to win against many well-funded competitors chasing the same broad opportunity. Horizontal products tend to succeed through deep workflow integration, network effects within companies, or ecosystem strategies that make them hubs for other tools. They also face challenges with customisation — serving every industry means no single workflow is perfectly optimised for any one, which creates opportunities for vertical SaaS players to win specific niches by going deeper.