3 Essential Steps to Building and Launching a Successful SaaS Startup
If you have the burning desire to start your own software as a service (SaaS) business, you need to understand that it’s a much more complex story than it seems. Many entrepreneurs are both naïve and optimistic about the future when they venture into the process of launching a software company. To evade the costly pitfalls, you need to outline your needs before anything else. If you are unsure what to launch and need a pretty dang idea, you are in the right place.
Here we have developed a broad perspective on the most successful ways to build and launch a successful SaaS startup.
Step 1 # Identify a Problem
Every niche or industry has a problem that can be SaaSified. Today, numerous processes in everyday working life could be easily performed with artificial intelligence (AI). So, the first step would be to identify a problem you have experienced first-hand that your SaaS business could resolve.
Often, tech entrepreneurs quit their jobs to design a specific product for the industry they work in because they are well aware of its needs. Or they prefer to create mobile apps that relate to their personal hobbies. For instance, Tim Hegarty, a famous musician, has built an app to provide other musicians with a platform to host adverts and make money.
Once you have the idea, it’s time to conduct market research. Why? Identifying a problem doesn’t mean everyone is affected by it. Before you begin designing a system, do some research and see if there is a prospective customer base. Or can you fix the problem better than anyone else? Ask friends, family, or colleagues whether they would like to use a service like the one you have envisioned.
Step 2 # Write a Lean Business Plan
No way you can get around this step. You must write up an effective lean business plan to build and launch a successful SaaS startup. Don’t write a 40-page outline, instead come up with a one-page pitch, to begin with.
It’s the easiest and fastest way to put your idea on paper. Your pitch should roughly cover what you are going to do (strategy), how you will go about it (tactics), how you plan to make money out of this (business model), and who will be doing what and when (schedule).
Now that you have created a lean plan shake a leg to validate your SaaS idea. Because essentially, your lean plan is just a list of assumptions. It will help you find out whether or not those assumptions are true. You can validate your SaaS idea by answering questions like: Can this idea really generate money?
Step 3 # Deploy Developers
Football is a highly competitive sport, and you cannot win on your own. You need the best players by your side to win the game.
This is equally true for a SaaS product. Whom do you think will burst in when things aren’t going your way or whom do you trust to fix the bugs in your software and offer users a seamless experience? Building the team with the right tasks assigned to the right tech talent is the key to any startup’s success.
You may be a good designer, but you are not so good at putting ideas into someone’s head. Or you can hire a cheap freelancer to develop your SaaS product but end up having an app full of bugs. Thanks to poor coding practices that wrecked your software development project.
An easy way out is to hire an offshore team of designers and developers that works as an extension of your in-house team. It will give you tighter control over things and ensure you will get high-quality work. On top of it, you can hire the best of the lot without worrying about the budget as their fee is more affordable than a native software developer in the US or Canada.
