How To Make A Software As A Service Startup

On my track from Zero to Hero I was looking for an idea of a meaningful, assisting online business concern. As there are various ways of achieving that goal I was wondering which path should I take. I've gathered my ideas and wrote this blog post.

Some time after, one of the readers of that item postal service (and also my colleague) asked me to be a co-founder of a new online business concern. I took it into consideration, examined pros and cons and finally decided to accept the offer.

We're starting this business concern from scratch and I desire to walk you through all the steps of the process. It'll be a case report in a real time.

FYI: We all the same accept our nine-v twenty-four hour period jobs, then our time is express. Nosotros want to prove that it's possible to create another stream of income in form of online business organization on the side.

Recipe for a business

What exercise you demand when creating new business organisation?

Idea
Monetization model
Market place
Proper execution

Combination of those four points is a recipe for a successful business. It could be summarized similar that: Execution of your idea attracts the market which pays you according to your monetization model.

Let'due south get down to the details.

Idea – what are nosotros really building?

Coming upward with business organization ideas is quite challenging. At least with the successful ones. More often than not in that location are ii ways of how you can proceed:

Create innovation, something that hasn't been created still. Like Snapchat.
Use some well known idea, but create production that is better, simpler, more specialized or has another added value. Similar Base of operations CRM.

We took the second route and decided to build web based, SaaS application for insurance agents that helps them with their work. Kind of small, specialized CRM.

What is SaaS? According to Wikipedia: „Software every bit a service (SaaS) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is typically accessed by users using a thin client via a web browser." In our case information technology will be web application with paid admission, hosted in the cloud and available from any location and any device.

Monetization model – how our product makes money?

Too creating value and helping people we want our business to generate revenue. Similar near SaaS products nosotros'll base our monetization model on recurring payments with monthly/annual fees. To concenter new customers we'll offer a 30-days free trial.

Market – who would utilise our production

Now let's evaluate the size of the marketplace and see if it's even worth stepping into.
As we live in Poland we'll target the local market. It's effectually 200,000 insurance agents in Poland. Allow'southward assume nosotros accuse $xx per calendar month per user, that gives us $4,000,000 monthly. If nosotros could get one% of the market place (2,000 users) it gives united states of america $40,000 per month. Worth a try I think.

Execution – how can we build the product?

Even the best ideas without proper execution are nearly probable doomed. Nosotros need a way to build and launch our product. Luckily we're both software developers, then we can do the programming ourselves, we don't demand to hire anybody. At least for now.

If you're thinking nearly building similar product, but you can't code, consider taking a programmer as a co-founder.

3..ii..1.. GO!

Starting something from scratch is ever exciting, as well equally being your own boss in that thing. Your head is total of ideas, you lot're buzzing with motivation, your life is bang-up and full of possibilities. I dear those moments and I cherish them. I remember that fifty-fifty if you fail, you're already a winner, because yous had courage to start.

Before starting actual development we demand to make few more decisions.

Proper noun and domain

First of all we need to choice up a name for our awarding and purchase corresponding domain. Why is it necessary to practice information technology and so early? For branding purposes, as you volition read afterwards, fifty-fifty though the product doesn't exist yet nosotros'll start promoting information technology and begin to look for customers.

Nosotros decided to get with the name: „Polisa due west Chmurze" – it'southward Polish for „Insurance policy in the cloud". We chose Polish name, because, as you know we're targeting Shine market place.

Applied science

Choosing applied science stack could exist challenging, particularly for non-technical founders. Fortunately nosotros are technical, so it shouldn't be so hard for us. Being .Internet developers nosotros're plain biased towards .NET stack, which isn't considered to exist a startup-friendly. However we decided to use it, mostly because of our feel which enables rapid and efficient development. If you're interested in the details of our tech stack, I'll draw it hereafter.

Hosting

For handling your tech stack you need proper hosting. We decided to go with Azure. Azure is a cloud calculating platform created by Microsoft for edifice, deploying, and managing applications. It's a not bad identify to host your apps (not only .NET ones) and what matters most you can get information technology for gratis for 3 years (overall upwards to $120K). You just need to bring together the BizSpark programme and yous'll get Microsoft software and Azure for free for few years. If you're interested cheque information technology out here.

MVP

Earlier creating the actual full featured production y'all should start with building a prototype, which in software development is called MVP.

MVP (minimum feasible production) is a product which has just enough features to solve the main problem you're addressing and can give yous enough information to validate your idea. The purpose of MVP is to not waste your fourth dimension and money on a product no one will want to employ.

Actually cracking number of startups doesn't require much coding for validating their ideas. It could be done in a concierge MVP way, where instead of automated processes, you lot manually create a solution to client'due south issues. For case: your application serves a feed with most of import news based on user's interests. Instead of creating advanced algorithms up forepart, you simulate that mechanism and manually create the results. Later on that you interview your users, check their reactions and make certain your idea is valid. If not, pin (alter the idea or it'south execution) and go through that procedure again.

Important affair near building MVPs is prioritization of your product's features. We tin carve up them into to two groups:

Must have
Nice to accept

„Must have" group is a core of your business organization. This part solves the main problem of your customers. It's the reason why they will use your production. Majority of „must haves" must exist included in your MVP. Time for features „nice to have" will come after validating the idea, when yous already have some customers. Although sometimes 1 of the „nice to have" functionalities can give yous leverage over your competitors, in most cases exit those for later.

In our instance we don't need then strict validation process, because our business model is more or less known. Notwithstanding we volition build the MVP, find customers, validate the idea and only if the validation is successful we'll create the end product.

„Must have" features

Easiest way of picking features for the MVP is to create brusque description of your product and then focus on the keywords. Let's do that now.

Our product helps insurance agents with managing clients and their insurance policies. Based on those information, user can generate custom reports and transport reminders to clients about catastrophe policies.

From this description we tin easily extract major „must have" features:

Managing clients
Managing insurance policies
Generating reports
Sending reminders

Those features should exist now particularized with user stories. User stories are short sentences using everyday language describing functionalities from the user of the system perspective. For example:

Feature 1: Managing clients
User story 1: As an agent I create a new customer
User story 2: As an agent I edit selected customer data
User story three: Every bit an agent I'1000 listing all my clients

User stories originated with Farthermost Programming and are more than human-friendly version of use cases. Each user story can be broke downward to multiple low-level tasks. For instance:

User story 1: Every bit an amanuensis I create a new client
Chore 1: Add client entity to the database
Task ii: Create „new client" form
Chore 3: Handle pressing „save client" button

Creating that kind of feature fragmentation actually helps during the development, since it gives us pocket-sized blocks that are like shooting fish in a barrel to produce and easy to test. It's too easier to track the progress of the project, which is especially of import in example you're paying somebody to do the work.

If yous accept information technology covered y'all're gear up to start building the MVP.

Advertise your make and build excitement before launch

Edifice the core product is obviously important, but fifty-fifty the best ane will practice no good for the public if they don't know it exists. You should tell the earth about information technology immediately. Building excitement effectually your product, even if you haven't started information technology however could be the key to your success. Similar in example of Dropbox where earlier launch they collected around 75,000 electronic mail addresses of people who wanted to utilize their product. How they accomplished it? Only, they created a landing page and used social media to direct the traffic into it. It went viral, hence the results.

Landing page

Skillful landing page should be a single web page that presents your brand, describes the value proffer of your product and has articulate, uncomplicated „call to activity" request, such every bit „buy now", „request invite" or „join the newsletter".

For the purpose of our projection PWC (Polisa w Chmurze) we built such landing page. Principal purpose of information technology is to collect emails of potential customers. You can find it here polisawchmurze.pl. Now let's analyze it.

1. Brand presentation and call to activeness – cherry button „Sprawdź" (means check out)

2. Value proffer

3. Main part of the telephone call to activeness. „Exercise you desire a free invitation? Leave united states your email".

CTA

To create this landing page I used free Boostrap template from hither, added treatment of the „leave your email" form and continued it to Google Analytics.

What is current issue of our landing?

153 unique users visited the page
ten potential customers signed upward

Analytics

Conversion (percentage of users who signed up to overall number) on our landing page isn't and so loftier, simply y'all need to recall that this is a niche product without whatsoever advertisement. So far I'm quite happy with those results.

Social media

When your landing page is ready it'south fourth dimension to direct some traffic into it. There are number of ways of doing that, I'll start with the easiest one, the i we've already washed – creating a Facebook folio. It takes simply a few clicks to get it ready. Yous can find information technology here.

Facebook has a massive user base and it'due south very tempting to advertise your product in that location. Of class such valuable information have a cost. Unless you put some coin in your campaigns, information technology'southward very difficult to accomplish something. But when you do you tin create highly focused campaigns, which tin make a great deal especially when marketing niche products. For case y'all can target your advertising to people from Poland in age thirty-45 who are somehow connected to insurances.

As an experiment I've created small, iii-days campaign for my fan-page and put few bucks in to it. This campaign generated few leads in form of electronic mail addresses of potential customers that were left on our landing folio. I recollect there is a large potential for our production in that course of marketing.

Building the product

Likewise building the landing page we already started working on the core awarding. And then far we've built:

Login page
Simple registration page
Full general layout
Few sample pages

Nosotros also created most of our core domain, database versioning machinery and some infrastructural code. Since our awarding is by and large information-driven we demand a good way of displaying and managing data on the client side. We decided to go with DataTables . Then far it looks quite promising.

Grid

Our electric current tech stack:

Back-end: C#, ASP.Cyberspace MVC, SQL Server, Entity Framework, XUnit
Front end-end: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, DataTables
Source command: Git
Continues commitment: Azure
Task management: Visual Studio Online (Team Services)

What'due south adjacent

We want to finish the MVP and start validating our idea as soon as possible. In the meantime we'll continue to promote our brand and build excitement effectually the production. We're going to experiment with other ways of advertisement, such as AdWords and directly marketing.

I hope you enjoyed this part of my Nada to Hero journey. I would really appreciate your feedback in comments.