No Lock in, No upfront Commitment, No cost to implement - the FaaST Principles

Discover how the FaaST Principles can revolutionize your buying and delivery processes, ensuring you pay for value when received and eliminate implementation costs and barriers to entry or exit.

Understanding the FaaST Principles

The FaaST Principles are a set of guidelines for buying and delivering value to customers. Throughout our careers we have seen some or most of these principles being used to drive value for customers and for the business that uses them. As the software industry have evolved and changed these principles have crystallised and become clearer.  By understanding these principles, you can optimize your processes and achieve better outcomes. It is important to familiarize yourself with each principle to effectively implement them in your organization.

One key aspect of the FaaST Principles is paying for value when received. This means that instead of paying upfront or in advance, you only pay for the value you have actually received. This allows you to ensure that you are getting the desired results before investing further. By adopting this approach, you can minimize financial risks and make more informed decisions.

Another important aspect of the FaaST Principles is the elimination of implementation costs. Traditional buying and delivery processes often involve significant implementation costs, which can be a barrier for many businesses. However, by following the FaaST Principles, you can avoid these costs and streamline your operations. This not only saves you money but also makes the process more efficient and agile.

Additionally, the FaaST Principles emphasize the need to remove barriers to entry or exit. In traditional business models, there are often barriers that prevent new players from entering the market or customers leaving vendors that no longer deliver value. These barriers can limit competition and hinder innovation. However, by embracing the FaaST Principles, you can create a more open and dynamic marketplace, allowing for greater flexibility and choice.

Finally, implementing best practices is a crucial aspect of the FaaST Principles. By adopting industry-leading practices and continuously improving your processes, you can enhance your competitiveness and deliver better value to your customers. This requires staying up-to-date with the latest trends and innovations in your industry and actively seeking ways to incorporate them into your operations.

In summary, understanding and implementing the FaaST Principles can greatly transform your buying and delivery processes. By paying for value when received, eliminating implementation costs, removing barriers to entry or exit, and implementing best practices, you can revolutionize your operations and achieve greater success.

Maximizing Value with Pay for Value When Received

This was always a desired state for many customers but difficult to achieve when buying from some of the bigger software companies who had started out early on with different licensing models.

Oracle and SAP grew to prominence with what we today call On-Premise software were as a customers you buy a perpetual software license and pay an annual maintenance fee. You then implemented the software in a lengthy and costly implementation process where you could customise the vendors software "to meet your unique needs". This of course made it hard and costly to upgrade or change vendor

Salesforce was the big disruptor that lead the transformation away from on premise based CRM tools like Siebel System. They advocated for a cloud model with the famous No Software branding.

Many companies has since adopted the cloud based delivery model where the client bought a user licence that he/she paid an annual fee for. If the client committed more users or for a longer contract periods he/she got a lower user price. The client was still committed to the contract period and could not exit the contract without penalties. 

SAP and Oracle eventually jumped on the cloud-bandwagon and has spent a fair amount of money buying companies and trying to transition from On-Premise to cloud-based delivery of Software

With the move to Cloud from On-Premise the commercial construct of the licensing changed but the client was still locked into the same type of committed commercials with a user-based cost model

We believe as a buyer you should be able to move beyond this and have no upfront commitment but only pay for value when you receive it. Our pay-as-you-go model allows you to do this. You can use more or less of our solutions and your payment will go up or down based on your usage with no penalties and no lock-ins.

We believe that this model will be at the core of how you buy software in the future and we are seeing many examples of pay per use being adopted today - not least buy the Hyperscalers - Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Other examples are companies that describe their model as product led rather than sales lead. Hubspot - a competitor to Salesforce in the CRM space use this model where I can start with a smaller (restricted) product footprint, but can use the software with very little cost. Canva or Atlassian are other examples of companies using this type of model to break free from the traditional way of user based licensing 

Eliminating Implementation Costs

Approaches to implementations have changed as software companies have moved from On-Premise to Cloud.

Initially implementation cost were substantial. Customers were often encouraged to build customisation of the vendors standard products which generated more implementation revenue but also built big barriers to exit. This was also hard to support and upgrade.

In the Cloud era buyers were driving away from customisation and wanted to use more of the vendors standard functionality and best practises which was great as it drove down the cost for implementations and made upgrades possible at scale which also unlocked the ability to adopt new capabilities and innovation. Actual implementation methodology didn't materially change

For most established product we believe we can drive implementation time and cost down even further by only offering best practise configuration and designing a solution that requires a minimum of data to load.

We have set ourselves the goal to implement within a week of a client signing up to our service and not charge for that implementation effort. We are seeing many successful firm trying to drive in this direction - companies that have gone down the path of Product led growth like the ones mentioned above are good examples. Other companies like Clari have sought to minimise implementation if not remove it entirely. In their case this stems mostly from having to integrate data from different systems into the Clari Plattform I believe.

Removing Barriers to Entry or Exit

By removing implementation cost and not requiring upfront committed budget we believe we have removed the biggest barrier to entry.

If you want to add a termination for convenience clause in your contract we are not opposed to it.

Many small and medium sized companies in the UK have an immature procurement function or lack procurement specialisation inside the existing organisation. Some perhaps lack procurement specialist altogether. With our Procurement in a Box concept we believe we are removing barriers for these organisations by providing access to such competence and experience

We are looking for more areas where we can make it easier for you to consume our products in a pace that you are comfortable with our innovative solutions around working capital finance and micro insurance are other exciting examples we are working on and hope to share with you soon 

Implementing Best Practices for Success

Implementation best practises have long been an idea that most every provider have signed up to, yet the mere fact that implementation and professional services was a revenue stream that at the end of the quarter or the fiscal year all added up removed the organisations desire to really drive to a best practice model.

Measuring utilisation in the delivery organisation also contributed to lessen the change that could be achieved. Many well-meaning practitioners have pioneered best practice approaches in different business but the inherent revenue stream and built in productivity and performance metrics have made real change hard if not impossible

We are trying to change that by removing the structural barriers - we are not going to charge for implementations which some would argue could lead to less quality in our implementations. That risk will be mitigated by operating a pay-as-you-go model. Having operating principles that are aligned are one of the best drivers in any business.