Given the iterative nature of planning a business, you will likely come back to your action plan and add more steps as you go. Instead of rushing headlong into your first and favorite idea, this step acts as a check. It will help you determine whether or not you have a good idea that can be turned into a viable business. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is doing mostly secondary market research, instead of primary research getting out of the building to talk to people face-to-face.
It can be as easy as launching a coming soon website , running search ads or even launching a kickstarter to see if you gain any traction. The important thing is that you are getting real-world feedback and setting parameters for success to determine if your idea has merit. Gene Caballero, co-founder of GreenPal, validated his idea by getting out and speaking with random people. Based on what you learn, you may find you need to go back to your lean plan and revise it or refine it.
The presence of competitors in your market is actually a good thing. It means a problem has in fact been identified. We know that Word and Excel are time-consuming, error-prone, and offer no help and resources. Our solution, an automated business planning tool, helps eliminate those pains for customers.
Keep in mind that your competitors may not be immediately obvious. The industry your entering may simply have very disparate companies currently providing services.
Another great, and somewhat necessary testing method in the SaaS space, is creating a minimum viable product or MVP. This is the simplest version of your product. Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, popularized this strategy for web applications. If you can get an early prototype built, all the better.
Besides software prototypes, MVPs come in many flavors, including:. An MVP is a great way to save time and money before you go ahead and build anything, so take the time to make one and run it by your potential customers.
SaaS products often use a subscription-based pricing model. So instead of paying once for a lifetime of use, your customer pays on an ongoing basis — usually monthly or annually. You can think of it as a software license. The longer they stick around, the higher their lifetime value. You likely spent some time modeling different subscription-based sales forecast scenarios during the creation of your lean plan. It hopefully gave you a rough idea of how reducing churn the number of canceled subscribers and other variables can affect your path to profitability.
Growing SaaS companies are always testing their pricing models. You need to be willing to shift your pricing to fit what your customers are willing to pay. Now there are a lot of different ways to get customers in the door to kick the tires, from offering free trials, to freemium services with upgrade options.
You can check out the Bplans guide to SaaS pricing models for more on how to get started. You may want to pull from the competitor research you did above to help position yourself. You can also leverage tools like Canva to workshop designs, brand colors, and logos with little to no design knowledge. For UpKeep founder Ryan Chan, spending some time on the branding process helped set his company apart from the competition.
However, we have been able to differentiate [ourselves] and also excel by making enterprise software fun and enjoyable. Our biggest differentiator has really been our design, from the ease of use to our playful tone. If you want to learn more about how to develop your own unique tone of voice, check out this article by branding expert Elicia Putnam. In fact, it can be used to get everyone on board and ensure messaging is consistent. This will make mixed messaging much less likely, and make it that much easier for your partners to help you spread your message.
I recommend sticking with a short. It is where you will store all your consumer data. Choose wisely, as this is a matter of privacy. The hosting provider is the cloud provider used as a base to access the application. Minimum Viable Product MVP is a preliminary product offering that has the features to attract new users and acts as an anchor to validate the idea. It helps to get the real-world response of the product on how well the audiences receive it. Building an MVP rather than a finished product allows you to test different concepts and get feedback from users.
Whether using an experienced prototyping team or building and managing your team yourself not recommended unless you have experience , it will be more convenient to provide feedback on the prototype rather than the actual build. In the final stage of building a SaaS product, you now have a clear idea of developing the right product with a strategy. By performing the above steps with extreme care and prudence, you will ensure that you are building your SaaS services or products in a way that suits the market and is beneficial to you.
In this way, you will determine the appropriate strategy for SaaS development and understand how to create SaaS products in high demand. You need to balance your product strategy, customer demand, internal team demand, and stakeholder demand and somehow translate it into a SaaS product that makes sense. From a strategic point of view, you need to understand that your product needs to fit into a broader and efficient workflow.
And if so, you can build a part of your roadmap on partnerships and technical integration. Further down the line, you should enhance the product with more updates to suit the market and customer requirements.
You must implement a clear development strategy to build a better product. Only an alert team can create a phased and agile roadmap to adapt to changing customer and market needs. SaaS can provide significant benefits to most businesses, primarily cost. SaaS is the best business model for customers and software vendors when implemented correctly. It offers your customers an easy-to-use system, and at the same time, gives your business an easy way to update the product and easily communicate those changes to customers.
The traditional payment model included buying an enterprise software license, resulting in huge payment debts. Since SaaS is generally subscription-based, i. And the subscription-based payment depends on the use of the infrastructure. SaaS exists in the cloud, which means no hardware installation costs. If you lease the software from a third-party service provider, you can reduce the internal costs of purchasing and installing all software and IT infrastructure to zero.
With the SaaS approach, companies can benefit by getting customized solutions that offer extra features to help them scale their services. SaaS is a software implementation model in which you build the applications in the cloud infrastructure; customers can use these SaaS services over the Internet. Unlike these software products that need storage space, clients can access SaaS, stored on a server in a different location, over the Internet.
The SaaS Service model thus enables users to access the database from anywhere on any device. Therefore, the customers can now easily focus on their business and avoid constantly spending time and money upgrading hardware to support the application.
The SaaS services offer a seamless onboarding process and usage. It has also created the opportunity for flexible working, providing more convenience for employees. SaaS flexibility further benefits to avoid overhead costs workstations and servers in many forms, helping evolve the whole business environment. While the SaaS products are quite accessible, the internal infrastructure has high-grade security encryption. The most popular may be keeping up with job costs. Imagine opening your laptop anywhere and successfully using your Internet browser to keep up with on-site documentation.
Imagine comparing your budget with the labor and materials you've already used, in real time. Web-based software with a monthly user fee could offer smaller contractors the ability to link the office to the field.
We're going to see more solutions deployed through the web," says Norman Wendl, president and founder of Corecon Technologies, Inc.
As an engineer, Wendl noticed the pains it took to recode information by hand from the original estimate to the general accounting for job costing. The project management team, who mostly managed from the field, were also in need of access to cost control tools that were part of the accounting application. In , Wendl used his industry expertise to start Corecon Technologies, Inc. The company's mission is creating project-estimating tools that are tightly integrated with project management.
Last February, Corecon released its fourth version of software with the web-based Corecon 4. Using the previous Corecon 3. The new version is fully automated, transferring data from one stage of a project to the next with the click of a mouse, and offers customized solutions for general contractors, subcontractors, homebuilders, remodelers, and architects and engineers.
Larger organizations can take advantage of Corecon 4. Using the web, estimators in different offices can collaborate on one job. It can also enable owners, architects, engineers, and subcontractors to collaborate on documents using a secure project website. It's easy to get started. Like the email builders, you compose a template with a bunch of reusable components, and you customize them by providing values to their props.
They will be replaced with their corresponding value by, in my case, Mailgun, before being sent out. First, generate HTML from your mjml templates. You are able to do that with the VSCode extension or the web-based editor:. It's an email address people use to contact you about your SaaS, rather than with a lola hotmail.
When an organization, say, Acme Inc. While I'd heard of the 'multi-tenancy' term being associated with a SaaS before, I never had the slightest idea about implementing it. I always thought that it'd involve some cryptic computer-sciency maneuvering that I couldn't possibly have figured it all out by myself. So don't worry—If you know basic SQL again indicating the importance of mastering the basics in anything you do!
I was on hover before it still hosts my personal website's domain. Namecheap also has more competitive prices in my experience. At which stage in your SaaS development should you get a domain name? Well, I would say not until when the lack of a DNS registrar is blocking your development.
In my case, I deferred it until I had to integrate Mailgun which requires creating a bunch of DNS records in a domain. You know those URLs that has a app in front of it like app.
Yea, that's a 'custom domain' with the 'app' as its 'subdomain'. And it all started with having a domain name. So go ahead and get one in Namecheap or whatever. Then, in my case with Firebase, just follow this tutorial and you will be fine.
This was a stage where I struggled for the longest time?. It was one hell of a journey where I found myself doubling down on a cloud platform but end up bailing out as I found out their downsides to optimize for developer experience, costs, quota, and performance latency. The journey started with me jumping head-first bad idea into Digital Ocean since I saw it recommended a lot in the IndieHackers forum.
And sure enough, I managed to get my Nodejs up and running in a VM by following closely the tutorials. Then I learned about AWS Lightsail which is a mirror image of DO, but to my surprise, with more competitive quota at a given price point:. So I started betting on Lightsail instead. I didn't want to have to pay that money when I wasn't even sure that I would ever have any paying customers.
At this point, I supposed that I had to get my hands dirty to optimize for the cost factor. But there were just too many of AWS-specific things I had to pick up, and the AWS doc wasn't exactly helping either—It's one rabbit hole after another just to do one thing because I just needed something to host my SPA and Nodejs for goodness sake! Then I checked back in IndieHacker for a sanity check, and came across render.
It seemed perfect! It's one of those tools that are on a mission ' so you can focus on building your app '. The tutorials were short and got you up and running in no time. And here is the ' but '—It was expensive :.
But I held my ground. I revisited AWS again. I still believed AWS was the answer because everyone else is singing its song.
I must be missing something! But I couldn't overlook the fact that both of them force me to completely work by their standards and library.
So at this point, I'd had it with AWS, and turned to another The thing that drew me to GCP was its documentation—It's much more linear; code snippets everywhere for your specific language; step-by-step guides about the common things you would do for a web app.
Plus, it's serverless! Which means your cost is proportional to your usage. The GAE 'standard environment' hosts my Nodejs. GAE's standard environment has free quota unlike the 'flexible environment'. Beyond that, you will pay only if somebody is using your SaaS?. This was the only guide I relied on. It was my north star. It covers Nodejs, Postgresql, Redis, file storage, and more:.
Start with the 'Quick Start' tutorial because it will set you up with the gcloud cli which you are going to need when following the rest of the guides, where you will find commands you can run to follow along.
If you aren't comfortable with the CLI environment, the guides will provide alternative steps to achieve the same thing on the GCP dashboard. I love it. I noticed that while going through the GCP doc, I never had to open more than 4 tabs in my browser.
It was the complete opposite with AWS doc—My browser would be packed with it. An instance of Cloud SQL runs a full virtual machine. And once a VM has been provisioned, it won't automatically turn itself off when, for example, it has not seen any usage for 15 minutes.
So you will be billed for every hour an instance is running for an entire month unless it'd been manually stopped. The primary factor that will affect your cost here, particularly in the early days, is the grade of the machine type. The default machine type for a Cloud SQL is a db-n1-standard-1 , and the 'cheapest' one you can get is a db-f1-micro :. The other two cost factors are storage and network egress.
But they are charged monthly, so they probably won't have as big of an impact on the bill of your nascent SaaS. If you find the price tags to be too hefty to your liking, keep in mind that they are a managed database. You are paying for all the times and anxiety saved from doing devops on your database.
For me, it's worth it. Now that I have got a database deployed for production, it's time to dress it up with all my schemas from the. To do that, I need to connect to the database from pgAdmin:.
If you were following the main guide about Nodejs, you can't miss this guide about setting up your Redis in MemoryStore. See this for comparison of free quota across different cloud platforms.
Cloud Storage is what you need for your users to upload their files such as images which they will need to retrieve and possibly display later. There is a free tier for Cloud Storage too. I have a npm script in the root's package. Then I found GCP. It's rather convoluted. So you can skip that. Easily done in minutes even when it was my first time there. Another option you can consider is Netlify which is super easy to get started too.
Similarly to deploying back-end changes, I have another npm script in the root's package. They are a chain of scripts that each runs sequentially upon triggered by the deploy-client script. Tip : If the changes you made are full-stack, you could have a script that deploys 'client' and 'server' together:. Building the rich-text editor in Sametable was the second most challenging thing for me.
I realized that I could have had it easy with those drop-in editors such as CKEditor and TinyMCE, but I wanted to be able to craft the writing experience in the editor, and nothing can do that better than ProseMirror.
Sure, I had other options too, which I decided against for several reasons:. Prosemirror is undoubtedly an impeccable library. But learning it was not for the faint of heart as far as I'm concerned. I failed to build any encompassing mental models of it even after I'd read the guide several times. The only way I could make progress from there was by cross-referencing existing code examples and the manual , and trial-and-error from there. And if I exhausted that too, then I would ask in the forum and it's always answered.
I wouldn't bother with StackOverflow unless maybe for the popular Quilljs. In keeping with the spirit of this learning journey, I have extracted the rich-text editor of Sametable in a CodeSandBox:. Apologies for oversimplification is in order. So I had to do it with the cors npm package:. A SaaS usually allows users to pay and subscribe to access the paid features you have designated.
To enable that possibility in Sametable, I use Stripe to handle both the payment and subscription flows. The last key component I needed for this piece was a 'webhook' which is basically just a typical endpoint in your Nodejs that can be called by a third-party such as Stripe.
I created a webhook that will be called when a payment has been charged successfully to signify in the user record that corresponds to the payee as a PRO user in Sametable from there onwards:.
I use Eleventy to build the landing page of Sametable. I wouldn't recommend Gatsby or Nextjs. They are overkill for this job. I started with one of the starter projects as I was impatient to get my page off the ground. But I struggled working in them. Although Eleventy claims to be a simple SSG, there are actually quite a few concepts to grasp if you are new to static site generators SSG. Coupled with the tools introduced by the starter kits, things can get complex.
So I decided to start from zero and take my time reading the doc from start to finish, slowly building up. Quiet and easy. I use Netlify to host the landing page. There are also surge. You will be fine here. There is no shortage of marketing posts saying it was a bad idea to " Let the product speaks for itself ". Well, not unless you were trying to 'hack growth' to win the game. It's easy to sit and get lost in our contemporary work.
And we do that by accumulating debts from the future. One of the debts is our personal health. Thanks for reading. Be sure to check out my own SaaS tool Sametable to manage your work in spreadsheets. If you read this far, tweet to the author to show them you care. Tweet a thanks. Learn to code for free. Get started. Forum Donate. Kheoh Yee Wei. I hope something here will be useful to you. I did it for two reasons.
I was wrong. But there were a few qualifications I wanted my decisions to meet: No vendor lock-in — This ruled out using the Firebase SDK all over my codebase. This included 'create-react-app', because ejecting it forced me to inherit and maintain its massive tooling infrastructure. This ruled out 1 Project generators that output complex architecture and layers of boilerplate codes, 2 Using third-party libraries such as 'knex.
Pay-as-you-need — I wanted to keep my operating cost proportional to the usage level. This ruled out services such as 'one-click-deployment'. To be fair, I had the following things going for me: I was building a simple SaaS. I was not anxious to scale, dominate, disrupt etc. I was still holding my day job. I had accepted my odds of failure.
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