Below are five simple but truly effective tips that will help you create a successful SaaS application that will bring in decent profit.
1. Find an idea
Research is one of the most important steps you need to take to ensure your SaaS product is a success. Though this recommendation may seem way too trite to be of any use, make sure to heed it.
In our experience, the best way to do research is to have an idea. At the initial state, you may not have a concrete idea for the software you want to build. And the best way to find it is to look at yourself, your friends, or family.
2. Validate your product viability
Once you find the idea, you need to validate it. Otherwise, other people besides you may take advantage of it. And you’re going to end up finding that nobody actually wants it. The best way to validate the idea is to go check Facebook groups for Amazon, provided you’re intending to build an Amazon-based solution. If you SaaS software helps comedians find venues, you may want to join Facebook comedy groups and put out feelers to them.
3. Attract customers
If you want to get your SaaS app business off the ground and win more customers, consider doing the following:
- Get rid of your free plans. If your product has a lower price point, you might consider a trial model instead. As a result, you can see a significant increase in customer conversions by letting them try before they buy.
- Shorten the trial period of your app. Most trials are 30 days. Yet some extend beyond that to 60 and even ninety days, which is not a good idea. Your customer won’t find out something about your software in four weeks that they weren’t able to find out in one week.
- Offer prepaid annual contracts. Give your customers the ability to pay for the full year’s worth of service upfront. Offer them a discount and enjoy your spike in revenue.
4. Choose a technology stack
Now that SaaS apps are ubiquitous across the web, more developers wonder what tools, or what technology stack to pick to create a successful SaaS app. See below a shortlist of the basic stack components you may want to be using when building your product:
- PHP (Laravel)
- WordPress
- Ruby on Rails
- MySQL and PostgreSQL (databases)
- Apache and Nginx (servers)
5. Find professional developers
The success of your product rests on the professionalism and diligence of the people involved in its creation and promotion. There are loads of web developers and designers out there eager to help you with your SaaS product. To choose the right person, make sure to take a look at a potential candidate’s portfolio. You should know that the developers with strong portfolios charge quite a lot of money, but their work is definitely worth it.
Source – James Woods
