There’s a little-known and lucrative online business niche in the tech world that few people are even aware of. It’s white label software reselling, and every-day entrepreneurs are making an absolute fortune off of it.
There are enterprise-level software applications that are for very specific needs, and the software creators, or OEMs, need salespeople for their product to succeed. Some enterprises hire their own salespeople, but just about all of them will partner with small businesses or independent entrepreneurs who will represent their software for them.
Essentially, people are brokering the relationships between software companies and software clients, which is as easy and lucrative as it sounds.
Our niche at Digital Samba
At Digital Samba, our niche is in the online collaboration software industry. We make software that facilitates internal and external communication in organizations like hospitals, large corporations, schools, municipalities, and especially in universities.
We are as OEM as it gets. Our developers have been making the webinar industry since its inception. We have been around and in the game for a long time. Many of the major iterations of this industry were our iterations. We are making the future of this industry as you read this very article.
Another big thing that you need to know about us is that we’re very adamant about white labeling.
What is white labeling?
All white labeling is reselling, but not all reselling is white labeling.
White labeling is the most important feature that software reselling partners look for when considering a new vendor.
White labeling is when you can purchase our core technology and totally rebrand it as your own.
This is useful for large-scale enterprises that want to have an internal communication system that’s under their brand in order to convey more institutional professionalism to their users. However, to software resellers, this means you can repackage our technology as your own and sell it to enterprises who use and need these kinds of software solutions.
Without white labeling as a feature, reselling software becomes virtually impossible to do professionally or profitably.
There is such a thing as reselling without white labelling though.
Consider a local car dealership. That’s a reseller. They’ll have a big-name car brand like Toyota, GM, or BMW – but the dealership itself is locally owned and operated under that brand so they can resell and service those cars.
A white labeling relationship is different. An example of a white labeling relationship would be Apple. Most of Apple’s products are manufactured for them by other companies like Foxconn. The majority of what Apple does is design and marketing. It’s also the wealthiest company in the world.
How does (software) reselling work?
The relationship between software resellers and software OEMs is very similar to the relationship between car dealerships and car manufacturers. A car dealership is owned locally, and its business is to sell and service a particular brand of car manufacturer’s cars. Software resellers sell and support software in about the same way.
Imagine having a company of industry experts manufacture a high-quality product for you to put your label on and sell.
This is actually how most brands work. Most branded products are manufactured for the brand by another company that specializes in making that thing – or an OEM.
This is true in every industry – auto, chem, electronics, industrial equipment, and also in software. It’s actually fairly uncommon for a brand to also be its own manufacturer.
But why?
Because both marketing and manufacturing at scale are complex, and companies tend to specialize in one or the other rather than trying to do both.
This isn’t just true for every product, but for every component in that product. Everything around you in normal life really takes a series of reselling relationships to come into being and then get to you so you can use it.
In our particular case, since we specialize in developing industry-leading collaboration software, we maintain relationships with resellers who then brand what we make and sell it as their own product to customers like universities, hospitals, corporations, and municipalities.
There’s a lot of opportunity for our white label resellers.
Is the reselling business for everyone?
Chances are you have a local IT company or two. It’s very likely that they represent a few software vendors for their clients already. Most successful small IT companies do that to supplement their business model because of how highly profitable it is.
IT companies are apt to do this because they are used to doing tech support for clients, and usually already have service relationships with a few large local companies or organizations.
But that doesn’t have to be the case. Natural-born entrepreneurs thrive in the fast-paced and highly lucrative world of OEM reselling.
Anyone who is familiar with selling items at a flea market, or a garage sale, or has the moxy to find bargains at thrift stores and yard sales to sell high online can absolutely start a small OEM software reseller business working from home as a full-time source of income. Those people who know how to pull themselves up by the bootstraps are the ones that end up being exceedingly successful in this industry.
How to start reselling
It can start a number of ways, but it always begins with a relationship.
Sometimes it starts with building a relationship with a software vendor, understanding their product, and then reaching out and making the connections to people who need that product.
Other times it starts at the opposite end. You may have a good relationship with some IT people at a hospital, or maybe the Dean of a local university, and you may work backward from there by finding out what they need and tend to buy, then go and make the connection to the best vendors to supply those needs to the entity that you have a relationship with.
Either way, you are in the right place. Because sooner or later you are going to find that all large organizations have the need to seamlessly communicate amongst themselves and that we are one of the very few OEMs that truly provide for that need.
When you are interested, you can reach out to us and learn more about what sales material and guidance we have for understanding our technology and how to apply it to large scale organizations’ needs. We have sales literature and plenty of support information that’s worth perusing through to personally answer your curiosity.
What you’ll find is that there is virtually no risk at all with exploring the option of reselling software, and quite the potential to enter a business with a very healthy profit margin.
How reselling can become a successful business
Many of the major software companies that we know and love today are in fact, at their core, mostly software resellers. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft all have OEM sub-vendors that supply software components to them that they then white-label.
For example, Google Maps gets its satellite data from several other companies that specialize in satellite imagery. It then re-packs that data into a product to make a hefty source of income. That’s just one major example of how huge software reselling actually is as an industry.
The software economy is an ecosystem of relationships between specialist OEM providers, developers who synthesize many of those components into products, software users, and finally the people who make all the connections and build the relationships that keep the software ecosystem going.
We at Digital Samba are OEM software providers as well as software developers. We hope that you will be the one that makes a profit by becoming a reselling partner.
