Running Marathon and SaaS Service

Running a Marathon and Running SaaS service are similar?

I often love to draw parallels between my running journey and corporate world. This is another attempt to draw the parallel between Running a Marathon and running a SaaS business. They say running a marathon 30% effort is to reach 35th km and 70% effort is to finish remaining 7km, these last 7km separates runners from the walkers. Similarly creating a SaaS product is 30% effort rest 70% effort is maintaining it, onboarding new customers, supporting them, creating disciplines like release and upgrades.?

Let us draw deeper and further parallels to it.

Running is a team sport so is SAAS

While we may see an individual winning a running medal, there is a village that’s working behind the runner. Kipchoge who is world record holder marathon runner has his own pacing crew that runs with him, to pace him, to keep him away from head wind and to push him when required, not to miss the medical staff that often checks his vitals, his coach that trains him, various sponsors that help him, staff that manages his energy drinks while in the run (yes these professional runners have their own energy drink tables dedicated to them). In the SaaS world, while product may look like Kipchoge, there is whole crew that’s working behind the scene, these are security, release management, customer support, DevOps ClouOps and many more. Often unsung heroes but these are essential for the success of SaaS. Imagine Release management not finalising scope of upcoming release and finalising dates for the release, imagine security not reviewing the service improvement to protect customer data, imagine Devops not creating automation to perform automated and seamless upgrades, imagine Cloud ops not reviewing the infrastructure that supports the upgraded service, last but not the least imagine customer success not aware of upcoming improvements or features in the service. All of this will result in customer pain and thus possible customer churn, hence whether it is running or SaaS, there is village that works to make you successful.?

What got you here won’t get you there

Its easy to run your first 10k, or easy to get those first 3 minutes improvement in your long run, however it gets tough as you get better, you have to have a solid plan that raises the bar to get you to your goal, efforts you put in for running that first 10KM run won’t work to your next 15KM run, unless you raise the bar and spend more efforts. Similarly efforts you put in to support your first 10 customers on SaaS are not enough to support your next 5 customers. As you add customers, complexity of your SaaS service will increase and you have to be ready to anticipate those efforts and be ready for it. Over the period of time, you will automatically scale well to add those extra kilometres to your run, similarly in SaaS to support more and more customers.?

Its a Journey not a destination

Running is a journey, which means you can’t say I did this marathon and now I don’t need to practice anymore, you have to keep doing the right things or else you will go back to where you started from. Similarly SaaS is never a destinaion, specially in todays competitive world where technology is ever evolving, if you don’t keep up with what’s changing, or how to add further bells and whistles to the product, you will cease to exist.?

Factor in little deviation

We all know while we love to be as much disciplined in our runs, we all also have a life to live and need those days when we don’t feel like running. Similarly on SaaS side as much as a non customised and stable SaaS service we want, its a given to allow some customisation by the customers or they won’t like the product, here the key is how do you limit or control the customisation, just like how do you limit/control the rest days, doing anything over will cause an issue to your upgrades, supportability and sustainability of your SaaS service. ?

Efficiency is the key

With every km you are running, your body is working hard, the burn out of the body is measurable through your heartbeats per minute, your cadence, your fatigue, always practice such that you can run longer faster at lower heartbeats, or consistent cadence, thus you can run longer without burning out energy. Similarly in SaaS business, running the business at financial efficiency is the key. While our aim is to have satisfied customer, it’s coming at what cost? If you are spending too much than the revenue then it’s not sustainable model, you will soon run out of cash reserves, just like you are spending too much energy while running, you will soon burn out and have to stop running. So watch your cost closely, Autoscale/Multi Tenancy/ Micro services/Containerisation/Self support go long way in managing your SaaS business efficiently.

So many other parallels

Right choice of running gears as compared to right choice of Micro services for SaaS, variations in the run pace or routes during practice to the QA/Performance and security testing before new release on SaaS, Running fundamentals of strength training with SaaS fundamentals of automation for deployment, automation and self-service and the list goes on and on.

Thank you for reading and Happy Running/happy SAAS service to all you folks