In today’s post we are going to discuss the opportunity of starting the SaaS Startup for a software engineering background. First of all, let’s discuss what is a SaaS? SaaS is a short form of Software as a Service. When you provide a service in form of a Software it is a SaaS. The SaaS providers bear all the maintenance and hosting cost and also provide the support to the customers and increase features over the time. This way the customer does not have to install anything in their local system, and they can use the software over the internet without installing it. There are lot of possible ways to earn money from SaaS Specially while you are providing services you can charge. There are many successful business models based on SaaS. The famous one is Subscription based business model. Like the GitHub provide.
Pricing Models for SaaS
Before discussing anything else let’s discuss some kind of Business models which you may adopt based on your SaaS which will let you monetize the Software Service. So, you developed some kind of software which people are eager to use, and it solves their problem now you have to make it profitable to be a startup and saleable. You need to adopt the business model which could be one of following.
Subscription-Based Pricing
This is one of the most successful business model and pricing strategy for SaaS based companies which ensure recurring revenue. Customers pays recurring fee, typically monthly, or yearly to access or use the software.
Tiered Pricing Plans
This kind of pricing plans are for tiers. Software companies offer multiple tiers or plans for different customers segments. These plans differ in terms of usage limit or functionalities or both. Common tiers include free trials, basic plans, premium plans, and enterprise plans.
Metered Pricing
In these kind of pricing plans, customers are charged based on usage. This is also marketed as Pay as You Go. This kind of pricing plan is very common in Google Products like Firebase etc. Charges are based on their usage of the software, such as the number of active users, data storage, or the volume of transactions processed.
Know your Market
Before launching the SaaS Business, you should identify the problem and know the market. You should feel the pain of your customers who are facing and identify how much serious the problem is that they are willing to pay to solve that. This way you would have to spend less amount on marketing and even the small shoutout would impact into lot of potential customers.
Validate the SaaS Idea
You should validate the idea before you actually start developing the business around it. There are number of ways to validate the SaaS idea like early discussing with the potential customers. Do proper market research or interview the potential customers. Talking to your target customers directly and asking them questions about their problems, needs, goals, and expectations and interviews can help you validate the problem-solution fit of your SaaS idea. You can also get some insights about the required features and value proposition of your product even before you launch.
Minimum viable product (MVP)
Never try to make all the features to launch. If you try doing this, you may end up doing the hard work and you may launch something which is not the need of the market. Or the features you implemented are outdated. Or even you may get bored, or heart broken or spend lot of money that you may lose interest in launching the business. So, it is best idea to launch an MVP or minimum value product. The MVP is the simplified version of your product that has enough features to test the core assumptions of your SaaS idea with real users.
Test and Iterate
Once you have your MVP ready you should test it on a small group of early adopters. These are some tech early adopters who are interested in testing the early idea of the products. You can join different communities related to your market and try to find them and test the idea and ask for their feedback and based on their feedback try to iterate the MVP.
Early Adopter Platforms
There are lot of platforms available for finding the early adopters where you can market your SaaS. Some most of the popular platforms are Product Hunt, BetaList, Hacker News and Indie Hackers. Give some time to learn the platform. See how others are marketing their products and try to learn. Once you know the pattern you should start shouting out about your own product.
Reach Influencers to talk about Your SaaS Product
You can also try to reach social media influencers to give your product a shout out. This way you may get your product go viral if it has potential to target larger audience. But if your product is about a specific micro niche, you should reach the respective influencer. So always be care who you choose as your product ambassador.
Send cold Emails!
You should also consider sending some cold emails. Don’t try to be a spammer rather just politely talk about your product and you may get amazing response which could be a game changer for your SaaS business. If you are bad at this you could ask ChatGPT to write emails for you and you can easily get customer email ids from different site which sell this information and you can use that to broadcast your message via emails.
Start Blogging
If you have your own blog, you can start blogging about your SaaS product there or you could start a new blog or you could even use some free blogging platforms to do the blogging about your product it would give you broad reach to your potential customers.
It’s Launching Time
Once you properly tested your product on early adopters it is time to launch and celebrate your journey to new long path of success. Good luck