How to Kickstart Your Successful SaaS Company

When building your basic SaaS product, you will need to face many different stages of development in order to make sure you are ready to enter the market. If you are reading this, you probably have already started on your SaaS journey and you may even be searching for resources or ideas to guide you. You will need to know what the industry standards are in order to be successful and at par with other saas companies in your industry and class. You don’t want to build too much at this early stage and yet you don’t want to under-serve your customers or fall behind your competition.

Preparing For (SaaS) Liftoff

Let’s assume that you have a pretty clear understanding of your own core product offering, you know your customers and your market. Some of you may have even looked towards options for supporting tools for your SaaS development including customer service solutions, a CRM, analytics programs and one project management tool or another. Sound familiar? Now you are ready to build and launch your MVP without a moment to lose. Yesterday.

Preparing for liftoff also means making sure you have a proper website URL that is easy to remember, retell and type with a top level extension. You will have decided on web hosting, cloud hosting or other server options and you will have decided on a payment provider to make it easy for your customers to pay.

The Lean MVP Approach

Every SaaS company who needs to address their technical needs early on might look for alternatives to in-house development:

• Outsourcing: As is the case for most SaaS startups, they often turn to outsourcing their customized development to help them with their core features. 

• Open-Source: Since your time-to-market is key, many companies will rely on open-source software as an effective way to implement software, despite its many limitations. Skilled developers know how to manipulate and use this open-source software and it can save money and time at the beginning stages of a company. 

• Features-as-a-service: There is no need to write common features and nodules yourself, as the market offers many ready to use solutions for software needs that include payment processing, support chat and more. Integrating these features as a service into your MVP will leave you time and resources to focus on your core business.

Security 

When building your product you need to make sure that your customers feel comfortable and secure. When processing or storing data you’ll want to ensure that only the bare minimum of data is being collected. You will need to protect data from the outside as well as from the inside to make sure that other users won’t be able to access other users data. This is generally done using SAML & SSO, encryption, multi-factor authentication, multi-tenancy and authentication.

Scalability

There will be some important decisions to be made early on, including deciding on your architecture. You won’t want to have to rebuild that later since it can prove to be time consuming and costly. As your product and customer base grows, the integral features will need to be scalable to meet the ever growing demand for new customer facing features. Reporting and In-App messaging will be essential whether it’s scheduled or responsive and even more so, it will be needed in order to note and respond to product inquiry or bug reporting from your end user. 

Performance 

Even at an early stage, your users won’t be so forgiving if the performance of your SaaS product is slow or unresponsive. They will also want immediate availability of those basic features they are used to being served in a SaaS environment and by your competitors. In-App notifications, WebHooks, Web-Push, 3rd Party Channels are the must have offerings on your SaaS dashboard and within your SaaS platform.

At Frontegg we always consider the requirements that are necessary to plan, secure, build and scale your SaaS platform. Through our SaaS as a Service capabilities, we have integrated these features and basic essentials into our products and services leaving you time and resources to focus and give the majority of your attention to what your core business needs to grow. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or are interested in learning more. 

At Frontegg, we are your partners for all your SaaS essentials. Book a demo today and get started tomorrow, FREE.