Let's talk today about a cloud-based SaaS solution. It is a relatively new business model. But it is becoming more and more popular. SaaS applications are used in completely different areas: retail, marketing, finance, travel, entertainment, and healthcare. The main advantages of SaaS are availability, scalability, reliability, and instant and regular updates.
Therefore, creating SaaS is a great business idea that, if properly implemented, will bring you a good income. If you have already heard about the benefits of SaaS and you know exactly what you want to do to develop this product, this article is exactly what you need. Here you will learn about different types of SaaS products and get some examples of successful SaaS projects. In a detailed guide on how to build a cloud application, you will find information on how to create a team to develop a SaaS solution, and which frameworks, databases, and programming languages are best suited for developing such a product. You will learn about different types of pricing models and subscription plans.
5 Steps You Need to Perform To Build and Launch a SaaS Product
Creating a SaaS application is quite a long and time-consuming process. If you need help, read this section. Here you’ll find answers to the question: How do I create a quality and in-demand SaaS solution? Below you can read the description of the main steps in the SaaS product creation and launch. Follow this step guide and organize the entire business process efficiently and mitigate failures by creating a SaaS product.
Step 1: Analyse market
With the proper business analysis, you will understand whether your idea of creating a SaaS product is a good one and worth your time and effort. You will get information about the situation in the market in which you want to launch a new product. By conducting a market analysis, first of all, it is recommended to pay attention to the following aspects:
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Your competitors. What products do your competitors create? Who is their target audience? How do they promote it? You can analyze the competitors’ experience in creating a similar product and get a vision of the main opportunities and pitfalls.
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Features of similar products. What features are the most common in similar products? Here you can understand what your potential customers want to get using SaaS products. And, of course, you can add some new and useful features that will distinguish your product from others.
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Your target audience. What do your future customers do? What values do they have? What pains do they have? What problems do they want to solve? With answers to these questions, you’ll understand better what features you need to include in your product, what channel for promotion you can choose, and what pricing model is the most suitable.
Through a thorough analysis of the market, you will be able to choose the right business model for you and create a product that will best meet the expectations of potential customers.
Step 2: Draw a business plan
It is a step that should not be dismissed or ignored. A well-drafted business plan is essential for the successful creation and launch of a SaaS application.
When writing a business plan, think about the following factors:
Your USP. The USP is what makes your product unique. SaaS products are very popular today. And the choice of different cloud applications with different functions is huge. But how can your product be useful? Why should users choose it over many other applications? The answer to these questions should contain your USP.
Requirements for the product. A SaaS application can perform a variety of functions. Also, the requirements for each individual product can be different. But above all, to provide the best user experience a good SaaS product must meet the following requirements:
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Multi-tenancy
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Security
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User-friendliness
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User activity monitoring
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Real-time support and maintenance
Identify the main features of your product by analyzing similar products of your competitors, which is described in the first step.
The price model. First of all, you invest your time and money in creating a new cloud-based application to get profit as a result. So, at the planning stage, you need to determine how you will monetize your SaaS product. The pricing model needs to be determined before you start the product development process, as it will affect the functionality of the application. You can choose one of the most popular monetization strategies:
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Freemium: some basic features are free; a user needs to pay for more advanced features.
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Pricing per feature: user can pay for different sets of features.
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Flat rate: user needs to pay for a monthly or annual subscription to get access to the features of the entire product for the paid period.
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Pricing per active user: this is also a subscription for all the features of the product, but the subscription cost depends on the number of users who have access to the product features for the paid period of time (month, year, etc.).
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Usage-based pricing: a user pays for the app according to the number of times they use it (for example, the number of transactions or the amount of data used is taken into account).
Marketing strategy. Think about how you will promote your product, specifically which channels you will use. At this stage, you can think about social media advertising, content strategy, affiliate programs, and so on. The information you gained after your target audience analysis described in the first step will help you. You will know where you can find your potential customers. Do they watch TV? What products do they use? What social media channels do they use most of all?
Cost of product development. At the planning stage, you have to determine how much you can spend to build a cloud environment. The cost of SaaS development can depend on various factors, such as technology, product complexity, application features, and so on.
Step 3: Define technical stack
At this stage, you need to determine the material from which you will build a new product, like bricks to build a house. Such bricks are coding languages, frameworks, tools, and platforms that will be used to develop your SaaS product.
No single set of tools will work for all SaaS projects. Therefore, when choosing the technologies you should be guided by the requirements and objectives of your product. Here are the most popular tools:
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For front-end development: HTML + CSS and JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, Vue.js.
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For back-end development: languages such as Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or Django.
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Databases for SaaS development: PostgreSQL, MySQL, or NoSQL.
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And as a reliable SaaS hosting provider, you can choose Amazon (AWS), Google, Microsoft, or Heroku.
Step 4: Form a good team
The quality of the product in many ways depends on the level of professionalism of the development team. Therefore, to successfully create a SaaS product, you need to take the choice of specialists seriously. You need to create a team that includes:
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business analyst;
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designer;
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software developers;
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quality assurance engineer;
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project manager.
Finding a good specialist can be difficult. You can entrust SaaS development to your in-house team, hire freelancers, or delegate this task of creating a product to a Custom software development company that specializes in creating SaaS products.
Step 5: Development and testing
Once you've planned everything, selected the necessary technologies, and assembled a team of professionals, you can begin development itself. While developers work on the front end and back end, professional testers check at every stage of product development whether everything works well. Tests at any stage of product development allow to change code samples at an early stage and to avoid issues in the future. QA tests all elements of the system individually and how they interact. The new product should be tested in different environments, in different browsers, and virtual machines. Don’t forget that most of the applications people use are from their smartphones. So, it should be convenient to open your cloud/based application on a smartphone or tablet.
Developers don't create an entire application with all the features at once. First, a minimum viable product (MVP) is created. This version of the application includes basic features. If you offer your potential customers the MVP, you can gather feedback. The information you get will help you understand which features need to be improved, which ones can be added, and which ones can be removed. Once the application has undergone all the necessary testing and changes, the finished product can be provided to the end user.
The above instruction will help you not only to create a new in-demand product step by step but also to promote it on the market. Of course, the basic steps are described here. In some cases, you may need alternative steps to effectively organize the development of your product.
Final Thoughts
A cloud-based application is not right for every business. Still, this solution is becoming more and more popular because of its undeniable advantages. Creating an application from scratch is not easy. But hopefully, the above instruction will be useful for you.
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