It can be an exciting period to start a new SaaS business. It can also be a difficult task, though, if you don’t have a game plan. Flexibility and a solid foundation are key traits you’ll need that will work in tandem with entrepreneurial spirit and determination when it comes to disrupting the market by launching your new SaaS offering.
In this checklist, we’ll outline the things you must get right to ensure your SaaS business’s success.
1. Make a Tradeoff Decision
You need customers to purchase from you if your SaaS business is going to be successful. Ensure you have identified who these customers are, their wants and needs, how you plan to reach them, and the most cost-effective way to market and sell to them.
But it’s not a good idea to invest all your funds to attract customers. Hire customers at low costs (CAC), and build an amazing customer experience. Make sure your unique selling proposition (USP) is well-defined; make it as unique as you can and clearly differentiate yourself from your competition.
Furthermore, when acquiring customers, it is advisable to deal with lead generation rather than branding. This allows you to collect the data you need from your clients and make further improvements to your service and business as a result.
2. Next, Choose Your Launch Team
The first and, perhaps most important, is the selection of the initial team that you will go together on your SaaS business. This is where you review what you already know how to do and what kind of person you need to assist you in starting your business.
Looking for a technical co-founder? Or possibly someone with a better sense of marketing or business. All depends on whether you have the coding knowledge or you’re a great storyteller and salesman. Regardless of what you need, make sure to find your complementary piece, as a SaaS business can’t be successful without many elements.
3. Choose a Flexible, Future-Proof Tech Stack
For a SaaS business, you’ll need software, software development tools, software development frameworks, and software libraries to drive the application in both the front and back end. This tech stack will have to be flexible and future-proof, enabling you to make changes as you go.
Your tech stack should start with an API-first headless content platform that can fuel your digital product experience and be your marketing website and other content channels to help you attract and engage with your customers. Adding content management as an afterthought is suboptimal and sacrifices the long-term productivity of both your development and marketing teams.
4. Take Advantage of Open Source (Do not build on someone else’s Proprietary SaaS)
There’s a wide range of open source software technologies, and you want to use them as much as possible. Keep your software investments cost-effective and under your control. Avoid using some other vendor’s proprietary SaaS because you will be susceptible to its pricing, scalability, security, reliability and performance.
5. Develop a Feature List and Prioritize Them
You may believe your SaaS organization will be the next big thing, but only time will tell. But you will not be able to invest a lot of money into your business until you know that there is a problem that your customers have and you have a solution that they can pay you for, or that they are interested in your solution.
Essentially, you need to create a minimal viable product (MVP) that helps you to showcase what your product can do and test out how well customers receive it and how effective your SaaS product is at solving their problems.
6. Seek Product-Market Fit
Having product-market fit is essential to a successful SaaS business. If not, you may end up wasting a ton of money in marketing to an incorrect audience. To get product-market fit, you need to keep your customer in mind, understand their needs, and make it very clear what the value of your product is.
Investigate the market thoroughly and then talk to your target customers to make sure your product is in the right direction. With any feedback you receive, you can then determine if you need to go back to the drawing board or continue moving forward with your product.
7. Scale At the Right Time
One aspect of successfully launching a SaaS company that is often overlooked is what you will do when you are successful. After (and only after) you have product-market fit, and your customers are signing up at a rapid pace, you should start to scale. This means selecting a tech platform early that can accommodate more customers, more traffic, and can enable your team to grow (see above points 3 and 4).
You must select a platform that allows you to begin in a small size and grow as needed without having to move to another platform, or find another tool that performs the same task.
8. VCs vs Bootstrapping
There are a number of sources for funding a SaaS business. You can seek to create a product that will be funded with VC money for a stake in your business. Be prepared to show actual (or high-probability potential for) very high growth rates and a very large addressable market. However, you could also launch your company with any savings or other funds you have available, without having to liquidate a significant portion of your company’s equity.
Both work, but they will impact how you run your business in the long-term.
9. Remain Lean and Agile (and DevOps)
The concepts of lean and agile should be central to developing your SaaS startup. Adopt DevOps early and be hyper efficient in delivering customer features in a timely manner. Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous publishing drive operational excellence.
By creating products quickly, gathering information on your hypotheses, and then making adjustments based on feedback, you will find it easier to learn what you’re doing right and what you’re doing wrong and make a pivot if required.
10. Make Customer Service Investments
Acquiring new customers is the key to success with your SaaS business. However, you don’t want to keep having to obtain customers to remain the same while your other customers continue to leave. It’s important to spend the money on customer service and customer success so that your customers remain happy and you can resolve any of the small problems that they may be having, while keeping them connected to your brand.
The point is that content marketing is a more sophisticated strategy, and you shouldn’t underestimate its effectiveness.
Once you’re ready to create a marketing strategy for your SaaS business and identify new prospects and customers, you might consider launching a paid advertising campaign and/or social media marketing campaign to generate website traffic. This can be a great idea if your budget allows, but don’t neglect to use content marketing in your marketing efforts.
In content marketing, you will concentrate on producing, publishing, and sharing valuable material that tells your audience something they need to know and helps generate long-lasting SEO. Whether you’re developing a website that features the hottest trends in your industry or some of the ways your product can solve their problems, content marketing should definitely be part of your marketing efforts.
11. Keep an Eye on the Competition
The first step in making a successful SaaS startup is to build something else – a community. You can choose to interact with others in your target audience and field on social media or build your own niche community for your customers to interact with you and one another. Creating community through early customers can help to foster a greater sense of community, which can in turn lead to more loyal customers and help spread the word about your SaaS business.
12. Leverage Partnerships
No SaaS business is an island. Relationships and partnerships with other businesses will need to be developed that can assist in the growth of your business. This holds whether you are partnering with agencies to help you with your development or marketing or seeking out integrations with other SaaS businesses that can improve your current product’s functionality.
13. Don’t Worry About Brand Advertising
Get started building a brand, but don’t make it your first priority. If your Saas businesses are to survive, you’ll have to expand your runway…and more customers paying the bills. Hence, your initial focus should be on lead generation and reducing your CAC. If you’ve got existing customers and a decent runway, you can move into the long term of brand building and raise the awareness of your brand.
14. Strive to Avoid the Customization Business
Avoid attracting too many types of customers at the beginning. While each customer is different, there is a time to say no to a potential customer and when you shouldn’t “go with the flow” and change your idea. Keep to your niche; don’t verge into thin air and have to delve into new areas, too many products, or countries before you’re ready to handle it.
5. Build your SaaS Foundation on CrafterCMS
Flexible, future-proof, and with the ability to scale as required, CrafterCMS has all the ingredients you need to start building your SaaS business and digital products. An open-source headless “plus” CMS that goes beyond both traditional and simple headless-only CMS platforms, CrafterCMS enables you to provide what your technical and marketing teams require for their business.
A robust, easy-to-use content authoring platform and DevContentOps support allow you to test different ideas and make multiple iterations at a speed that you won’t get bottlenecked or stuck with technical content traps that will slow down your marketers or developers.
Releasing a SaaS Startup is Challenging, But it’s Not Hard if You Select the Right Technical Base
Check out our Customer Case Study and learn how the Saas startup Best Movies By Farr uses CrafterCMS to create a collection of video content that’s delightful to their actively engaged community of fans.
