Learnings from Covid-19: Building a Pandemic Proof SaaS Business
Covid-19 has taken the world and we all are learning to adapt to the new normal of social distancing. As we all enter the post-covid-19 world, there is no playbook which a SaaS business can refer to for building or surviving this uncertain business environment and everyone is learning with each other’s experiences and trying to adapt to this new order of things.
As companies start evaluating and planning their business strategy for the post-covid-19 world, technology will play a pivotal role in various aspects of the business. With this opportunity for growth, it becomes more important for SaaS companies to create products that will help enterprises in improving business efficiency and productivity.
CEO at Unicommerce, Kapil Makhija, outlines his learnings of COVID-19 from the perspective of a SaaS company. We have picked our top 5 stand out points:
1. Lean operations help you grow faster
Most of the workers can work from home with equal and sometimes more efficiency than a regular office life. Companies with multiple layers of hierarchy, often find it difficult to operate in such situations. The lean team structure gives the organisation a competitive edge to evolve and implement new developments and features at a much faster pace.
2. Keep the cash flow running
One of the most important learnings with COVID-19 is to have a razor sharp focus on your cash flows. In tough times like these, companies should judiciously allocate their existing resources to achieve priority business outcomes. It becomes important to stay active and agile and evaluate the impact on their cash flows through a thorough review of their credit lines, debtors and creditors. It is also important to understand the client context and empathise with them. This will ensure a steady cash flow even in the future, once the ecosystem starts recovering.
3. Keep learning and innovating
The pandemic has led to a major slowdown in business. Which has given the majority of us a whole lot of time to reflect on not just the business you do but how to do it efficiently. It has given businesses a chance to re-evaluate their business models and build solutions that actually provided benefits to your customer. Every enterprise and SMB is evolving to meet the new realities of business and as a SaaS company, it’s important to innovate and offer technology solutions that meet their current business needs.
4. Focus on brand building
This is probably one of the toughest times for brands to connect with their consumers. Hence, building a connection with new customers, maintaining your pre-existing business and audience base will be crucial for any brand to survive. This is an opportunity for your brand to show that it genuinely cares about its customers. An active digital team, regularly creating interesting infographics, blogs, articles that will help your client, beyond the product you offer will help in strengthening the consumer connection.
5. Lead by example
Good leadership stands out in this time as it plays a monumental role during these critical times. A good and responsible leader will act as a pillar of strength and organisation’s voice for the team. It’s easy to be understanding and supportive in good times but in times like these, employees look up to the organisation to be supportive. Business leaders need to be more sensitive and understanding of the problems the teams might face. Teams with good leaders often stick together as they value and respect the leader who always stands by them.
Source – Kapil Makhija
