Want to build your own SaaS platform?
This is a huge market and yields massive returns if you get
it right.
According to a study done by The Insight Partners, “The SaaS
market accounted for US$ 31.57 Bn in the year 2015 and is expected to grow at a
CAGR of 18.6% during the forecast period 2016 – 2025, to account for US$ 172.20
Bn in the year 2025”.
Innovating in this industry is a chance to make a huge
impact on our world. Here’re a few amazing case studies of companies who hired
DevTeam.Space to build similar products:
Swift Gift– eCommerce Android and iOS App
SideKick Education – Education Web Application
Medical Supply – Healthcare Mobile App and Web Application
CONTENTS
What SaaS product do you want to build? Is there a market?
Determine your pricing model
Document your requirements
Pick a tech stack
Find Developers
Marketing your SaaS product
Deploying your SaaS product
What SaaS product do you want to build? Is there a market?
An illustration showing a satisfied SaaS customer
So, you have an idea of the kind of product that you want to
build, awesome! But how do you know it‘ll work? How do you know it will
resonate with the people who will use it and more importantly, will pay for it?
Testing the market
You can perform a litmus test of the market or industry that
you want to deploy your SaaS solution into by creating a website landing page
that has some simple HTML pages that illustrate how your new software will
solve a consumer or business need. To
really sell the idea, you can embed a short video that details how your product
works to help further sell the idea/product.
On this web page, you can place a “call to action”,
something which encourages visitors of the website to supply their email
addresses. In return, you might want to
offer a free eBook or promise potential customers discounted subscription fees,
etc., when the time comes that you unleash your SaaS product to the world.
You should promote your site on multiple social media
channels and popular websites such as LinkedIn and Reddit, thereby giving your
landing page site as much exposure as possible.
Installing Google Analytics will help you build a picture of
the locations and demographic makeup of visitors, and more importantly, if you
get enough, you‘ll have concrete evidence that confirms there is some mileage
in your idea.
Industry insider Kevin Felly said that you only need 1,000
true fans to have a business, so get promoting that landing site now!
Determine your pricing model
The phrase "Pricing Strategy" against a colorful
background
The first thing to do if you want to build your SaaS
platform is to determine your pricing model. This can be a tricky affair, as
you need to strike a balance between the value you provide to customers and
your profit margin. If you don‘t charge enough, your initial investment will
take longer to recoup and you run the risk of having to seek further
investment. If you overcharge customers,
adoption of your SaaS product may stagnate and turn off potential new
customers.
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You have a few options in terms of your pricing model and
there are arguments for and against each model.
Some of these include, but are not limited to:
Simple, flat-rate pricing
Usage-based pricing
Tiered Pricing
Per Feature pricing
Freemium
The list is by no means exhaustive and you need to pick the
model most suited to your business idea.
For example, are you happy to give users access to every
feature for a fixed fee? If so, then Flat Rate pricing might be the simplest
option. It‘s an easier sell, it also
makes sales and marketing easier as you only have one offer to push. A downside to this model, however, is that it
can be difficult to upsell to existing customers as you‘ve locked them down to
a fixed price.
Alternatively, Tiered Pricing gets around this issue by
attributing a cost per feature in your SaaS solution, a downside to this,
however, is that it can be tricky to determine which features that users will
want.
The answers to pricing model questions can be gathered
whilst your testing the market and trying to figure out if your idea has some
mileage in it. When you‘ve settled on an
idea, and figured out how you‘re going to monetize it, the next thing to
consider is getting a handle on the requirements of your SaaS solution.
Document your requirements
A hand writing the word "Requirements" and three
checked boxes next to it
If you‘ve confirmed there is a market for your SaaS product,
building the MVP is the next step.
Rather than building your entire application with every
feature included, a good approach is to build an MVP (Minimal Viable
Product). This contains the core
essentials of your application that are needed for it to function at the most
basic level. Having a minimum viable
product in place lets you test out your product with early adopters to get
feedback for future iterations. This is a great approach to get started.
To do this, you need to document the requirements for your
minimal viable product. There are
various approaches you can deploy to achieve this. The most common ways are to write the
functional specification or develop a series of user stories. Regardless of which approach you take, what
is common across each of the different approaches is that they detail the
system requirements for each piece of functionality in the system you want to
build.
Lack of quality requirements documentation can severely
hamper the delivery of your MVP, so take the time to make sure that the
requirements for your MVP are as clear and specific as possible. If you‘re a non-technical founder, it might
be worthwhile employing a business analyst or consultant to help you translate
your idea into technical requirements that a developer can just run with!
Now lets get deeper into how to build a SaaS application.
Pick a tech stack
A scheme depicting how a SaaS platform operates with
different operating systems
Now that you‘ve got the requirements documented for your
MVP, it‘s time to consider which technology you‘d like your SaaS product
developed in. Web technologies can be
somewhat of a minefield. Especially with
client-side/front-end development. There
seems to be a new client-side library every month!
When picking a technology stack to develop your SaaS product
or MVP, you‘ll want to consider several factors that may include, but are not
limited to the following:
How big is the developer resource pool?
How mature is the technology or programming language, is it
current, or dying?
Is the technology suitable for my MVP (e.g. can it support
big data, web services)?
Does the technology support the features you need?
Will you be able to integrate the technology with several
platforms?
Does the technology lend itself to being integrated with
other products?
What is the roadmap for the programming language?
Taking the time to think about these points will ensure that
you don‘t pick a tech stack that‘s out of date or that no-one wants to work
with, not to mention, will ensure that your tech stack is suitable for the task
at hand!
Find Developers
An illustration of a man working on a laptop, with an
electric bulb in his head showing that he got an idea
You‘ve now validated your idea, documented the requirements
and settled on a tech stack and programming language. The next thing to
consider in order to build a SaaS platform is to find a developer or developers
who can help you realized your SaaS dream!
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SaaS products are generally distributed over the cloud. They often manipulate data, consume other web
services and render information in the user‘s web browser. Because of these characteristics, building
your MVP or SaaS product often involves multiple skillsets.
When looking for developers to build your MVP or SaaS
product, you‘ll want to look for developers with skills that include, but are
not limited to:
writing database queries and interaction with datasets
server-side programming and business rules development
frontend development
experience with one or more JavaScript libraries
You‘ll also want to select developers who have a track
record of building and implementing web applications – at scale. You can look for developers domestically,
nearshore or even offshore. It’s beyond
the scope of this blog post to go into the numerous service providers on the
internet, so you will have a look around to find a few online services that let
you search the talent pool for developers with the unique skills you need.
Marketing your SaaS product
A question "Is SaaS Marketing Different" and an
answer saying "Yes."
Just before building your product, it‘s worth advertising
your brand to generate some excitement and to let the world know about it. Building this excitement around your product,
prior to building it could be the key to your success. For example, Dropbox built a landing page
(like we just mentioned earlier) and promoted it with the help of social media
which helped them harvest the email addresses of over 70,000 people!
Other channels that can help you promote your SaaS product
include, but are not limited to are:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Reddit
Instagram
The key is to use these social channels to get the word out
and help you generate some buzz around your product and, at the same time,
build a mailing list that you can contact when you’ve built the first cut of
your SaaS solution.
An illustration of a computer with different IT icons around
it
We can now move on the the fun part of how to create a SaaS
platform.
In parallel to building your email list, you can get down to
building your SaaS product! Expect to be in regular contact with your developer
or team, clearing up ambiguities in any of your requirements, testing the
product and ensuring that your core features have been built to spec.
If your team is distributed and located around various
locations of the world, there are plenty of online collaboration tools to help
you communicate. A popular choice that‘s
free for up to 5 users is Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). With VSTS, it can help you plan development
work better, code faster and improve developer productivity.
It integrates with most popular source control providers
such as Git and TFS whilst also allowing you to ship products faster by
implementing the practice of continuous integration. Using Kanban and Scrum boards, you can easily
visualize where development tasks are in the plan, if they‘re yet to be
completed, and how much capacity your team has.
Other important components of that you‘ll need to consider
in order to build a SaaS platform are:
types of the databases you need/want to use
queuing systems to run asynchronous services
cloud infrastructure to host your SaaS solution (it‘ll need
to scale on-demand)
content delivery networks
how you‘ll handle defects and software updates when you
go-live
As developers complete, features, you‘ll likely go through
several iterations of your product, when you get to a point when all the key
feature of your SaaS solution are built, it‘s time to deploy it!
Deploying your SaaS product
An infographic showing how Amazon Web Services operate
After you’ve finished building a SaaS product that fits your
requirements and meets the needs of your audience, it’s time to think about its
deployment. The main cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazons AWS
make it relatively easy to provision web servers that can host your SaaS
solution. They can scale on-demand and
are equipped to deal with surges in users of your SaaS application.
With Azure, for example, you can quickly configure
development, test and production servers that integrate with your development
pipeline and roll out automatic releases. Azure even has functionality that
allows you to auto-migrate between virtual machine instances, something which
can be helpful in disaster recovery or upgrade scenarios.
If you‘re nervous and don‘t want to release your product to
everyone on the mailing list you‘ve built from your marketing and landing page
efforts, you can contact a subset of users and invite them to into a private
beta test. This will give you time to
iron out any kinks prior to the main launch.
You may even get some valuable feedback during this stage on additional
features etc., which you can ask your developer to implement.
Monitoring Engagement
Finally, when you‘re confident your product is ready for the
world, and you‘ve let everyone know in your mailing list, it‘s important to
track user engagement and do an audit of KPIs and other core metrics. This will be the topic of the next blog post,
so stay tuned!
Final Thoughts On How To Build A Software As A Service
Platform
In this article, we‘ve looked at the key steps on how to
build SaaS platform. We covered how to identify an opportunity, why it‘s
important to get your requirements right and looked at how you can source
developers to help build your SaaS application.
We then looked at what to consider when establishing your
pricing model and some steps to take when deploying your application. Finally, we looked at what you can do to
market your SaaS application and closed out with the importance of monitoring
user engagement and how to use that feedback to help you drive the design of
your SaaS application.
Take the topics we‘ve covered into account and you‘ll be on
a good path to realizing your SaaS vision!
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