SSO drop-in for HR and engagement SaaS vendors

The moment a vendor realizes their engagement tool has a 3-star review pattern that always mentions 'login problems' or 'getting logged out', they know it's hurting retention — but authentication is not their core product, and rebuilding it properly competes with shipping new features. So it stays broken. The users who complain are frontline employees; the buyers are HR directors or IT leads who rarely experience the mobile login flow themselves. That gap between who feels the pain and who controls the budget means the pressure to fix it never reaches critical mass inside the vendor.

What's missing isn't an identity provider — those exist. What's missing is a thin, embeddable authentication layer purpose-built for HR and engagement tools, which handles persistent mobile sessions, social login (Google, Microsoft), and single-sign-on federation in a way that smaller vendors can drop into their product without rebuilding their auth stack. The complaints describe sessions expiring mid-use, re-authentication demanded after app updates, and no Google login option — these are symptoms of vendors who bolted a basic username/password flow onto their MVP and never upgraded it.

This is a business and not a feature because every new engagement tool that enters the market has this same problem at roughly the same stage of growth — they can't prioritize auth hardening until it's already costing them churn. The need recurs at the vendor level every 12-24 months as their user base scales onto more device types and corporate SSO policies. A vendor who embeds this once and pays a recurring license has permanently solved a problem that would otherwise require a senior engineer for two to three months.

What to build

Build an embeddable authentication module for web and mobile HR tools that handles Google/Microsoft OAuth, SAML-based SSO federation, and persistent mobile sessions without session drops after app updates — delivered as a white-labeled SDK vendors drop into their existing stack.

Where to start

Target engagement vendors who have already received public G2 or Capterra reviews specifically mentioning login friction, because those reviews are publicly traceable and give you a warm outbound hook: you can show the vendor their own one-star reviews before you pitch.

The hard part

Convincing a vendor to hand over authentication — a security-critical surface — to a third party requires a level of trust that's hard to earn without a named customer reference, so the first deal will take 6+ months of hand-holding to close.

How it makes money

Monthly license to the vendor based on monthly active users, starting around $0.10–0.20 per MAU with a floor — vendor pays once, their employees get seamless access forever.