There is a moment in every entrepreneur’s life when you have an idea, you worked out the business plan and concepts, maybe there are even customers who want to use or test the solution, but now what? How an idea can become a tangible solution, something you can show to your customers, partners, investors? In this text we will present some steps of those journeys which many of us tried but also many of us failed.
All startups started with an idea to provide services and solve certain problems on the market. Those problems can be attached to the specific industries and solutions can be provided in different formats. Here we will focus on solutions based on software, or more specifically Software as a Service (SaaS).
Software as a Service
So, what is Software as a Service? In short, it’s a model where you provide software to your customers when they need, and you charge them by how much they use. Instead local installations, or self-managed hosting, those services are delivered to them by using web technologies. That means they can start using solutions much faster by just using their browsers. They also don’t need to worry about any technical difficulties in setting up the solution or manage any kind of infrastructure for it. The whole concept is based on providing a focused solution for specific problems as easy as possible.
Today, there is a huge amount of SaaS solutions on the market and almost every industry already has solutions solving a number of problems. That doesn’t mean there is no room for new product which can solve different problem or even solve the same problems on better way. Just to give you some numbers, in 2021 SaaS market value was 152 billion USD, and it’s estimated by 2028 it will have a value of 720 billion. So, if you have an idea, or you have a specific problem which can be solved for some market, now it’s time to jump the wagon.
Building SaaS
Building SaaS solution is a process starting with building a minimal viable product (MVP). It’s a crucial step to get initial feedback as quickly as possible from actual customers and end users. While MVP is getting ready, it’s important to make sure there is a proper infrastructure where your solution can be deployed. Today, the most common approach is to use public cloud providers.
Once you have MVP up and running and initial customers provide you enough information how to move your product forward, it’s time to scale. Improving your solution and providing new features and functionalities is a constant agile process where you need to ship improvements, get feedback, and then iterate the development again.
Minimal viable product (MVP)
The minimal viable product is a product with just enough features which can be used by early customers. The goal of MVP is to get initial feedback and validate the idea of your solution. That information can give you a valuable direction and velocity how you want your product to evolve and what you will need to successfully accomplish that.
What does this mean? What are the actual features you want to have in your solution? In saturated markets and customers being daily overloaded with new solutions, how can you make sure your MVP will be enough to get early traction, positive feedback, and opportunity to scale your business?
We can help you with those questions and increase chances of having successfully MVP built and provided to your customers. By starting to build your solution, or better to say MVP of your solution, with the StormHub Engine you immediately speed up the process. By using the Engine, you are getting ready components which are the foundation of any SaaS solution.
Beside speed, which is crucial, there are also other benefits of building with the Engine. One of them is also the quality and number of features you are getting out of the box. Today, customers are used to have nice interfaces, smooth registration processes, automated invoicing, multi-factor authentication and much more. All these common features are already integrated in the Engine itself. Your solution doesn’t need to provide just a bare minimum, it can provide the best user experience from the start.
Deploying solution
When your MVP is ready, you need to have a possibility to run it and make it accessible to your end users. Of course, you can take the same approach and have your platform built in MVP way, by just providing necessary minimum. That approach is fast, but it’s also introducing certain risks. Some of the most common ones are issues with stability and reliability, or very dangerous security flaws and data leaks. All of those can really hurt trust in your product.
As part of the StormHub Engine, we also have Platform Experience. The whole concept of that platform is to help SaaS owners to handle technical aspects of running the SaaS solutions. More about Platform Experience you can find in our previous article.
Technical debt and future scalability
Once your MVP is running, and customers are giving back valuable feedback, it’s time to start thinking about the future and how your solution is going to grow in number of users or customers, but also in a number of features. You also need to be aware of technical debt, which happened during MVP phase and needs to get some attention. A mistake of avoiding it can be expensive in scaling where sometimes the whole solution needs to be refactored or rebuild just to make sure it can support needed growth.
That is another aspect where StormHub Engine is helping by providing modular components which are designed to scale. On top of that with the Engine your solution is built with microservice, and event driven architecture to provide best foundation for future growth.
Cost of building
One of the important aspects of building a SaaS solution is a cost. By average, just building MVP usually takes from 50 000 - 150 000 USD. It’s not an insignificant amount of money just to validate your idea. It’s also important to know the costs of hosting the solution, where, as we already mentioned, the most common approach is to use public cloud solutions. On top of that you need to include costs of different technology providers, depending on your use cases. Both technology and cloud infrastructure base their cost and pricing on actual usage. In most cases it comes with small amounts at the beginning, but those costs can have steep growth once solutions start to scale. It’s of key importance to monitor and anticipate those costs, otherwise you can end up in a position your costs become too high.
When we are talking about scaling costs, we also need to look at what it takes to build product beyond the MVP phase. Building a development or technical teams is very expensive and you need to constantly compete with huge amount of other software and IT companies. As you are starting, most of those companies can offer more attractive compensations and packages, but also reputation which follows by working for big players on the market.
So far, we just scratched the surface of the costs one SaaS company can have, and there are many more things which you need to consider once the solution starts to scale. For that reason, by using StormHub Engine you can keep your technical costs under control. As the building is much quicker, the costs of development are also reduced. The same is on the platform side, where we are making sure the platform is operational, and you don’t need to worry about unexpected bills or getting good deals for individual components. With StormHub Platform Experience you are having transparent and simple pricing. All that gives you a possibility to anticipate technical costs of building and running the solution from the start. The only thing you need to focus is to scale your business and find your end customers.
In this article we tried to explain some necessary steps in building Software as a Service solution. Together with the biggest challenges in each step we also tried to give you some perspective how StormHub can help you in this journey. For more information feel free to reach us at info@stormhub.cloud.