What does it take to build a SaaS product?

Ship manufacturer vs. Sailing company

Since we are all about smooth sailing, I’ll take sailing as an analogy here.

Building traditional software is like building ships. Your company is a ship manufacturer and you sell the ships you built to your customers. You sell the same model of the ship to multiple customers, and you may periodically make improvements to your ships and develop new models of the ships. Your customers own the ship, and they are free to customise it as they like, some might even ask you to do the customisation work for them.

On the other side, building SaaS software is like creating a sailing company. You only need to build one ship and use that ship to provide sailing services to your customers. You own the ship, handle upgrades to improve performance and scale it up as you acquire more customers. Your customers pay for your service to get them to their destination regularly, they may pay a different price for different types of seats on your ship, but you’re usually not tailoring your services towards any of them.

Now we are clear that we are operating a sailing business with a ship we need to build first, where and how do we start?

Planning and strategy

You have a clear vision and got to know your potential customers, now you need to make a blueprint of your ship, build it and start providing your services to them.

With traditional software development, the full scope is usually defined upfront, the roadmap is locked and the team work for 6 months to a year (or more) to deliver the final product. But for SaaS software, you don’t need to build the full-fledged ship from the get-go, what you need is a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP can be the most basic but functioning ship that sails your customers to their destination, i.e. solving their most pressing problem.

It will not be the perfect ship from the get-go, you’ll need to make upgrades along the way, but don’t let those potential upgrades delay your first sailing trip. Once you’ve completed your first sailing trip with the MVP product and delivered value to your customer, the journey of improvement starts. Your roadmap should be adaptable to your user feedback and market changes, allowing you to make continuous upgrades to your ship and improve your customer experience with each upgrade.

Security, compliance, infrastructure and scalability

With a sound plan and a good team in place, your ship should be running smoothly, flexible enough to adapt to the wind changes and consistently getting your customers to their designations. There is just one last thing to not lose track of - you are the service provider, and your customers rely on you to provide secure, stable services, handle compliance requirements and able to scale up as their needs increase. No customers will be comfortable boarding a non-registered leaky ship without lifeboats or with a sail that needs to be mended every 3 days causing delays in their trips.

Are you ready to start your sailing company now? Let’s recap with a checklist:

• Do you have a clear vision of what kind of services you want to provide and to whom?
• Do you know your target customer and what their most pressing needs are?
• Have you figured out a plan for an MVP, and acknowledged that this will not be the perfect product?
• Do you have a team set up that can operate in an agile environment, staying close to your customers and translating their feedback into continuous improvements?
• Do you have measures in place to ensure safety and compliance are always respected, and prepared to have an infrastructure set up ready to scale?

All checked out? Congratulations, you are ready to set sail on your journey of building a SaaS company! Just one last piece of advice, prepare to invest in it long-term, when your business scales, your software scales with it, and so will your team.