Many founders believe they are running a SaaS company when they are running a consulting company with good internal tools. If your team uses the platform to deliver work for clients who never log in, you are the latter, and that changes how you should hire, price, and focus.
Ben Houston • July 15, 2026
Why SaaS products that stretch one opinionated framework across multiple markets often become harder to use, and why scalable multi-market products separate universal toolkit primitives from market-specific frameworks.
Ben Houston • June 22, 2026
My dad bought an Apple IIe and a stack of Nibble Magazines. This was the start of my career in computer graphics.
Ben Houston • June 21, 2026
After a decade building enterprise 3D visualization at Threekit, I've moved on to build Land of Assets, a product visualization platform built on open standards, with AI image generation running off those same assets.
Ben Houston • April 14, 2026
3D on the web has exploded. The infrastructure to support it hasn't kept up. Here's why I built Land of Assets to fix that.
Ben Houston • February 2, 2026
This is the story of how I went from building Hollywood VFX tools to raising $65M for enterprise SaaS, and the three crucial lessons I learned along the way.
Ben Houston • July 26, 2025
After twenty years building computer graphics software used in Hollywood blockbusters and enterprise product visualization, here are the crucial lessons that can help entrepreneurs build more successful companies.
Ben Houston • May 22, 2025
Open Core combines the viral growth of open source with the revenue potential of enterprise software – but most founders get the balance wrong. Drawing from my experience building both open source and enterprise products, I explain why this model particularly shines for developer tools, and how to execute it without alienating either developers or paying customers.
Ben Houston • December 20, 2024
How I wrote the first version of Krakatoa at Frantic Films to render Doc Bailey's SPORE images for Stay, and how the renderer later reached Avatar, Harry Potter, and Exocortex Fury.
Ben Houston • December 6, 2024
After learning the hard way that chasing startups and SMBs was a dead end, I discovered why the path to sustainable SaaS growth lies in mastering enterprise sales and the 'land and expand' strategy.
Ben Houston • December 5, 2024
In 2002, I joined Frantic Films to write fluid simulation software. A small scheduler I built for those sims became Deadline, a render farm manager used by Blizzard, major VFX studios, and considered by the Academy for Sci Tech Awards.
Ben Houston • December 5, 2024
How a pioneering web-based 3D editor pivoted from visual effects to enterprise product visualization.
Ben Houston • December 4, 2024
