SaaS product is made of code and definitions (and lots of other things, but let’s leave at that for now).

Let me back up and share a quick story.

One of the first blog posts I ever wrote, back in 2007, was not only badly written but quite stupid as well;   a copy of it will exist on archive.org probably until my dying day. This is great – it will keep me humble (:

To summarize that error of a post,  I declared in a loud fashion that “Highrise is not a CRM”.

Jason Fried responded in the comments,, “I guess it depends on your definition of CRM”.

For context, Highrise was 37Signal’s new CRM product, hot on the heels of Basecamp. They had just released it. To my mind, it didn’t meet the standards of Salesforce and other enterprise CRM’s I was use to. Not enough bells and whistles.

But I assume this the definition of a CRM Jason was working with: “a product that can manage and organize interactions and relationships with customers and potential customers”.

Could be a notebook, an Excel spreadsheet,  a Salesforce instance – or Highrise.

Here’s the thing – 37Signals didn’t just have a SaaS product, they had another piece of IP to go with it: their own definition of CRM.

What’s the most important term for your business to define?

(This was originally published on Art of Message – subscribe here)