Sam Aparicio

Prove to me that you deserve to run my application!

The basic assumption behind Software as a Service is that I, the vendor, am more proficient at running the system than you, the customer.

So you give up control in exchange for a number of benefits.

But giving up control, in life, takes trust.

So a central question we seek to answer in maturing as a SAAS business is: how is trust in us increasing?

I earn trust by:

• Keeping the commitments I make
• Recognizing my mistakes, and fixing them
• Caring about the things you care about
• Being accountable for the outcomes of my actions

This brings me to the central question of this blog post: opacity breeds distrust and transparency enables trust.

Transparency is:

• Recognizing the limitations of my software when I sell it to you
• Proactively communicating about delays and complications in project work
• Providing a window into the health of the system, even when it is unhealthy
• Openly sharing the root cause of an outage
• Working with you on a shared disaster recovery procedure
• Telling you ‘no’ when I don’t want to put something on the product roadmap

Recently, I was struck by how quickly (within hours) a customer of ours had gotten in touch with another customer to share the details of the impact of an outage. Then, I remembered the Cluetrain Manifesto. This, in a nutshell, is why opacity no longer works.

Information about you wants to be free. You can’t fake it. You will get caught. You will get shamed. You will be mistrusted. And churned.

It’s best to be the first to come out with the information. You proactively share the bad news. And in the process, the trust that you generate more than makes up for the bad news you delivered.

So the value of transparency in SAAS is that it generates trust. And trust leads to good things.