#047: Guidewire & The Massive Insurance Market, Customer Acq. Motions, Busting A Myth
#047: Guidewire & The Massive Insurance Market, Customer Acq. Motions, Busting A Myth
One vSaaS breakdown. One biz story. One 'how to'. In your inbox once a week.
One Biz Story:
Guidewire & The Massive Insurance Market
Insurance is one of the biggest industries in the world and there is SO MUCH opportunity for founders to build here.
Case and point is Guidewire, a vertical SaaS business for Property & Casualty Insurance providers.
Let's take a look:
Guidewire is a software company that provides software for property and casualty (P&C) insurance carriers. It was founded in 2001 after the group saw an opportunity to modernize the legacy systems of P&C insurers, which were often outdated, inflexible, and costly to maintain.
Product: Guidewire focuses on four key areas:
Policy Center: Create and manage insurance policies
Billing Center: Payments / invoicing / billing
Claim Center: Create and manage insurance claims
Analytics: Enterprise analytics across all products
Go-to-Market: Their go-to-market is heavily focused on face-to-face sales. They also have a partner ecosystem similar to the App Store that accelerates adoption. I've written about the power of App Stores for vSaaS businesses before here.
Traction: Guidewire serves more than 540 insurers in 40 different countries. 2022 revenues were $812 MILLION. Growth is slowing at their massive size, up 9% YoY.
Market Size: Statistica estimates that the market size of the P&C and direct insurance industry in the US is $843 billion. MASSIVE. Segmentation is definetly a challenge here with big enterprises dominating the lions share of the industry.
Capital: Guidewire only raised $24.8 million in venture capital funding from US Venture Partners, Bay Partners, and Battery Ventures. The company went public in 2012, and is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GWRE.
M&A: Guidewire has made 6 acquisitions. The most recent ones are HazardHub, a provider of property risk data and scores, and Cyence, a data science and risk analytics company. These acquisitions enhance Guidewire’s platform with more data sources, models, and tools.
Vision: Guidewire’s vision is to be the platform that P&C insurers trust to engage, innovate, and grow efficiently. They believe that its platform can help insurers achieve operational excellence, customer centricity, and business agility.
What other companies out there are building vSaaS solutions for the numerous different insurance verticals? So much opportunity here!
One vSaaS Breakdown:
What is the primary customer acquisition motion of leading vSaaS companies?
One ‘How To’:
Let’s Bust A Myth…
You DON'T have to be the system of record or ERP to build a big vertical SaaS business.
You can be the:
CRM of the space (Veeva)
LMS of the space (Canvas)
Integration Layer of the space (Clever)
I've got a lot of other examples... What do you think? Agree or disagree?
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