3 Vital Steps To Build A SaaS Product.

In our last blog, we discussed the three reasons why SaaS will dominate the future. With no time wasted, let’s look at the 3 vital steps build a SaaS product.

Market Research.

Market research plays an important role when we want our idea to be executed in a seamless manner and for a long run benefit. Performing a market research will give deep insights about the market, reviews of the competitors’ products, what the customers need from the present vendor and what they are not giving to customers. Insights like these will definitely help decide whether to take the idea forward for execution or not.

Market research helps you identify what your customers want over what you have.

Defining and developing.

Once the market research is done. Once the report from the market research is positive, we need to define a clear plan for the SaaS product we are going to build. This plan should contain the programming language, tools, framework, and last but not least UI. While we met the technical aspect now, we should make sure what exact buyer persona (which market research would have denoted).

This targeted buyer persona will help us understand the problems they are facing. The more big and clear the problem is, the more chance for us to give accurate solutions.

After defining comes the development part. We can either have an in-house development team to build the product or collaborate with an external agency that can do it. Just keep in mind the plan meticulously explained to the development team and they keep that in mind.

Remember, neither YOU nor I can save the product if the UI is bad.

MVP or EVP Strategy.

During the build of the product, we should choose which strategy we are going to adopt. MVP or EVP. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. EVP stands for Exceptional Viable Product. The difference between MVP and EVP is that in MVP strategy, we will be developing the product at minimal costs. It is not exactly a full-fledged product but nevertheless, not less than that. It’s playing the game safely keeping the costs minimal in development, test the viability, get feedback from closed group (this group can be your target persona)

In EVP strategy, we will have the product developed completely to go live in the real market. The risk factor is high as the customers may turn down the product’s arrival in the market. If the welcome turns bad, then the huge amount invested is burned in no time. If we’re very confident about the product, or if our product is a new entrant in the market that tries to solve a big problem, then we may opt for it.

It’s all about identifying a sweet spot. Whichever suits our business, our financial capability we may go with that.

Closing thoughts.

One thing we should keep in mind is, there is always a room for innovation. In this era, everything is invented. The real entrepreneur would always identify pain points of the customers using or consuming a product and try to bring that new element along with all existing elements. In SaaS business too, we should look at what we can innovate that would give superior customer experience as well as customer satisfaction.