This podcast explores marketplace-led growth and cloud commerce, featuring several AWS Community Builder members discussing the benefits and strategies of selling SaaS products on the AWS Marketplace. The conversation highlights how the marketplace reduces friction for buyers and sellers by streamlining billing, security validation, and deployment processes. AWS Community Builders share their experiences with both purchasing from and listing on the marketplace, emphasizing the importance of proper pricing strategy, co-selling relationships, and leveraging partners like IBEX Labs to navigate the listing process. The discussion also covers how SaaS enables faster innovation by allowing developers to focus on building core products rather than reinventing infrastructure, and how AWS Marketplace provides credibility through AWS’s vetting process.
Interested in coming on the podcast? Email Marketing@jonmyer.com
Bill represents the AWS SaaS Factory team, which helps customers build and optimize SaaS products on AWS, covering both technical aspects like tenant isolation and business considerations like marketplace strategy. He emphasizes that marketplace should be part of the conversation from day one, particularly for enterprise customers with Enterprise Discount Plans (EDPs), as marketplace purchases count toward their AWS commitments. Bill highlights the importance of working with competency partners like IBEX Labs and Seller Cloud to navigate the complexities of marketplace listings and ensure proper pricing dimensions are established from the start.
Jay founded Labra.io after experiencing firsthand the time, money, and effort required to get enterprise products onto marketplaces and establish co-sell relationships with cloud providers. His platform simplifies the marketplace listing process through an intuitive UI and dedicated account managers who guide customers on pricing strategy, content optimization, and avoiding common mistakes that lead to rejections. Jay stresses that listing on the marketplace is just the beginning—companies must also engage in co-selling with AWS field sellers and continuously optimize their listings through testing and updates to compete effectively.
Sean discusses how AWS Marketplace provides co-marketing and co-selling opportunities for Skyflow, a data privacy vault that helps businesses protect sensitive customer data. He emphasizes that the marketplace reduces friction for both buyers and sellers by providing a self-serve experience without requiring extensive sales conversations, allowing engineering organizations to quickly test and integrate new products. Sean also highlights the broader trend of marketplaces becoming legitimate go-to-market strategies across platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, and AWS, where companies are building substantial businesses by leveraging these ecosystems.
Brian shares the developer perspective on how SaaS products enable faster innovation by eliminating the need to build infrastructure components like authentication from scratch, allowing developers to focus on core product features. He discusses LaunchDarkly’s feature management platform and acknowledges he hasn’t yet made a marketplace purchase despite exploring options, receiving homework from John to complete a trial purchase and share his experience. Brian emphasizes that AWS Marketplace makes sense for SaaS companies because it provides direct access to the massive AWS developer community that gathers at events like re:Invent.
Yehuda represents Sela US, an AWS-focused managed services and professional services partner whose team handles migrations, application development, and traditional IT operations. He frequently purchases marketplace products on behalf of customers, including security solutions from Palo Alto and observability tools from Datadog, and also lists professional services on the marketplace. Yehuda emphasizes that SaaS represents the evolution away from difficult-to-manage on-premise installations, and that AWS Marketplace’s built-in capabilities for billing, security vetting, and scale provide tremendous value that companies would otherwise have to build themselves, while the recent pricing update to 3% makes it even more attractive for sellers.
The only podcasts that bring real conversations to your audience!
Through natural style conversations, meant to have meaningful discussions.
Join the Conversation Today!
