How To Build A Successful SaaS Product / Application Development.

We like to request our readers to go through the last two articles to understand better, since its continuation: 1. Introduction to SaaS Product Engineering & 2. SaaS Product Engineering makes applications available Anywhere, Anytime. In this article, we will discuss the general guidelines for building a successful SaaS product/application. 

Over the past, I have worked with B2B enterprise software development companies. My role has principally focused on the individual and collective performance of the product management team. In the process of SaaS product development, there are several things that a Business Owner/ Manager should consider, Let us discuss the general steps to build a SaaS product.

Market Analysis

Market Analysis plays the most significant role in the success of SaaS application development. Intensive research before the development will give multiple ideas for your product and leads to the success of the product.

You will easily get to know your competitor's stories, the market demand, and user requirement. As the first step, validating your product development idea is ideal so that it helps to create a list of niche user requirement from the studies.

The market research you do allows you to decide whether the targeted audience/user will be ready to pay for the product and the business model gives them recurring benefits if it meets their needs. These insights will assist you to gain a transparent understanding of what users want today and what user’s wait for tomorrow. By this, you can build your product keeping those user needs and wants in mind.

Define SaaS Requirements

As we know, many of the SaaS products may have at least a few things in common. To determine the most essential functionalities for your SaaS product, look at it as a Technical solution rather than Application.

Analyse the risks that your product can create to users or understand what kind of challenges your product can develop so that it becomes easier to have a clear-error free for the development. You may not see a standard flow in the user needs because depending on the increasing demand, their needs to vary. The more clarity on the user requirement, the more accurate will be the SaaS solutions provide to your users.

Decide Technical requirements 

This is another important stage of your SaaS product development. The need of each user may vary from one to another; the same rule applies even concerning technology as well. Following scalable software, architecture is always advisable because you never know when your user may expand or bring changes to their business. coding languages, development frameworks, UI components must all be pre-decided and carefully. Otherwise, as per the future needs, it has to re-engineer the code as per changing scenarios/technologies

Let’s discuss some of the popular SaaS technology used by industries now a day: 

• #Frontend Development: #JavaScript frameworks – #Typescript, #ReactJs, #Angular, #VueJS, etc
• #Backend Development: #NodeJs, #Golang, #Django, #Python, #Java, etc
• #Database Development: #PostgreSQL, #MySQL, or #NoSQL / #Cloud Platform: #AWS.

Choosing the acceptable technologies for the SaaS development is more important because if it does not meet the user needs & future support, it may badly affect the cost and effort the development team put in each building stages.

Integration requirements

Another important consideration for SaaS development is that, the scope for integrations. To maximize the product value, integrate it with other applications that make it easy for the users to do multi-task in a single-window/screen. Smart integration with popularly third-party applications such as Slack, Lark, Gmail, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc can also play a role in increasing your revenues & product engagement. However, streamlining the integration process and ensuring ease of use are critical aspects of successful integration strategies that will help your SaaS product success rate.

Decide the Design 

So now we know user experience is essential for product success, it’s vital to think about your end-user. But what is UX design exactly? UX design is to create a link between humans (users) and your product. The Design face can be explained in general with the following steps:

• Initial research: user surveys, understanding user’s main challenges and comfort’s;
• Building user personas: use the research to make a fictional representation of your ideal users.
• Create user stories/sitemap: map the main goals and challenges; like the information need to include on your homepage/landing page - which may be moved to a different section; like about the organization, services, locations, testimonials?
• Create wireframes: basic designs of the user interface (like a blueprint for a house);
• Visual design: Visual designing plays vital importance, i.e.; the size and colour of each parameter are equally an aesthetic as well as functionality concern.

Define features & functionalities

The features and functionalities you bring into the SaaS product should satisfy the needs of your customers at first and be set unique from your competitors. Ask for more feedback from users end, and rectify them immediately, by resolving the root cause of the problem that can keep such issues forever away from affecting.

Launch prototype & get feedback

Once all this phase complete, now you are good to go with your product testing and can release the prototype before launching the final product. We can call it pre-launch or Beta testing of your product and get customer feedback on the features and user experience, user design.

This will assist you to overcome your mistakes/errors in the app performance and provides a finished product to the users.

Choose the pricing model

Accoutre your SaaS product with a carefully-vetted pricing model is the vital factor for maximizing your market engagement in the industrial. This is where product reliability and scalability plays an important role. Some of the pricing models for the reference:

• Usage-based pricing – Users pay as per the amount of usage
• Feature-based pricing – These pricing changes as per the number of features customized by users
• Pricing based on active users – Here, you charge based on the user for the entire product
• Freemium /Basic Trail – Users need not pay at the beginning for the provides limited features with an option to upgrade
• Fixed-rate – You fix a flat price for the entire product or chosen features and probation to renew on a monthly or yearly basis

It is important to consider the buying patterns of your target audience and the kind of solutions your SaaS product offers while deciding on a pricing model.

We can clearly state without a doubt, that the Saas product has produced a great variety of business opportunities now at the industrial level. The main thing that any business needs to remember when developing a new product is that, If the product doesn’t look user friendly, people won’t buy it. If the product doesn’t work smart, they won’t for it. The same logic applies to the success of all SaaS products. The users only talk about their user experience when asked about the product because, end of the day, it defines their relationship with the SaaS product.

To take the best from it, follow our expert guidelines on how to build a SaaS product. If you are in search of an expert development team that knows how to build a SaaS application? Heyooo Inc. we will care your ideas & need for the SaaS product and help to realize your vision. Our expert team will help you from all the technical issues that you may encounter too late, and most importantly, it will significantly save your costs.