How to Create a SaaS Product that People Will Love

At the heart of the business is a transaction. You can't get what you want without giving something in return. You want signups every day and there's no way to achieve that except by giving customers something that will fulfill their unmet needs. You want your SaaS product to grow and you have to figure out what SaaS metrics mean for your business. Achieving a breakthrough is real if you subdivide it into components. Your journey starts with following these steps to building a SaaS product.

You definitely don't want to find out after six months of hard work and thousands of dollars invested that no one is excited about your startup. There's a few steps to decide whether building a SaaS product is worth it. One of the important things is to find out what in your SaaS will make a user take off their credit card and fill in the form online to buy your service.

Get started with the problem and what solution are you bringing to the world. Is your solution a must have, or just a nice to have? Our suggestion on how to build a SaaS business is always start by finding pain points of your potential audience, by solving a problem you have, or someone in your industry has. If you really do isolate an acute problem in the market, you can grow extraordinarily fast.

That's where we started all our projects whether it is a real estate service that helps to sell homes without a broker like ListingDoor or EHR for nursing facilities like OnTrac.

In order to understand the pain points of the audience, you should talk to them, i.e. establish contact with a potential customer. Then tell a bit about what you do, tell that you communicate a lot with people like this person, list several options of problems and ask whether they face the same challenges. It works really well. What doesn't work is when you say: "Hi! I have a product. Go and buy it!"Only when you get the idea of what problem your SaaS can crack, move on to putting together a SaaS business plan.

Once you've found a perfect market fit, and had your MVP developed, SaaS success metrics become important. Don't think that metrics are for huge SaaS only. Start using tools showing data like conversion rate and annual revenue per customer. Let’s speed through the main metrics.

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR). This is the metric you want to be improving all over. It changes from month to month based on churn, your existing and new customers.

• Churn. It’s lost customers.

• Average revenue per customer (ARPU). How much a customer brings you revenue over his life span using your saas based software solution.

• Customer acquisition cost. This indicates how much you spend on sales and marketing to acquire a new customer..
  
  

Firstly, using the combination of the SaaS metrics, you can find out whether the time has come to scale your business in its current state or not. It's when the customer has brought you more money during the time that they are with you than you spent on attracting them.

Secondly, understanding your metrics will help your team to realize the importance of those numbers and start to improve them. Metrics is a powerful way to align your team around a direction you want to head in.

Just having a product built won’t make your customers use it. You need to bear in mind the idea of SaaS being a business. Just because your SaaS is technically impeccable, this does not automatically mean the business part will go smoothly. Its smoothness is always due to wise budgeting, marketing, sales and analytics.

What makes a good SaaS product is a logical and predictable business model. You need to know how your SaaS revenue streams work and how these revenues can grow and change over time. You need to learn how to market your SaaS, where the user's journey starts and who is your ideal customer. All this requires your attention, time for planning and analysis.

When you work alone, it's easy to focus on your point of view of how the product should be developed, which may be unsuccessful. Instead of evaluating further development from the perspective of customers, ask them directly. Let them send you feedback. Then collect it, sort it and make sense of it.

It doesn't mean that you should have a free beta version of your product to get the first feedback. The best feedback is the one you will get from your paid customers—those who have already spend their money thus have a certain level of expectations from the product. It’s the question whether their expectations will be justified and whether the product will live up to marketing promises.