With the invention of high-speed internet and online data mega-storage facilities, IT companies now don’t have to rely upon in-house data centers. The expenses of data infrastructure, expert team, and logistics can be extensively minimised with a revolutionary online software service model that we are going to discuss today. SaaS is one of the cloud computing models. Today the SaaS industry sees 18% growth in comparison to that in the year 2021. The whole purpose of this article is to let you know what SaaS is and its process of development.
SaaS in a nutshell
For a business and a consumer, SaaS is a significant facility on a daily basis. SaaS (Software as a Service) is one of the three main categories of cloud computing, apart from IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and PaaS (Platform as a Service). In all these 3 services, SaaS is commonly used and more popular, e.g. an email client like Gmail, apps like Office365, Adobe Creative Cloud; a music streaming service like Spotify, etc.
How SaaS works
The users who sought a subscription to a SaaS facility, access their software within multi-user architecture. That means the same pool of resources is accessed by plenty of users within a stack. The same hosted environment and same hosted servers where the users with paid subscriptions would have their own dedicated space to securely store their data. There is no installation involved or plugins needed.
Advantages of SaaS
SaaS solutions drastically differ from traditional licensed software. These are ready-to-use software. Everything is done on cloud service. Now we will see some of the amazing advantages of SaaS.
Complexity to simplicity
The ultimate benefit of SaaS is, you don’t have to be an IT expert to handle it. SaaS is a method of delivering software and applications over the internet via a subscription model. Before the emergence of SaaS, people had to install, manage and upgrade the software installed on their machines. But SaaS bypassed all these complexities.
All-inclusive service
SaaS provides a cloud service of software. Once you purchase the service, your software will be ready in a couple of hours. The productivity applications and services like sales management, human resource management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, etc. variety of functions are provided now through SaaS.
Saving overheads
Our offline software models are pretty expensive than that compared to the cloud services. The cloud service providers maintain and manage the applications. This saves the IT maintenance cost of the subscriber companies.
Endless data support
SaaS applications work upon the subscription models that you have to pay the amount on a monthly or on an annual basis. Some cloud service companies provide perpetual licenses too. They maintain everything for you, so you need to pay for the support service differently. If you need more database or compute power, then the subscription can be upgraded.
Access on the wheels
One of the most amazing benefits is you can access your SaaS application on the go and anywhere. If you are mobilizing your workforce then this feature is so advantageous for you. Only you need good hardware, an internet browser, and seamless internet connectivity to make SaaS work for you. Whatever geographics you have, your work won’t fall short! Be always up and running. Additionally, your data is maintained efficiently because SaaS is mostly a highly secured cloud service solution.
Auto-updates
The main problem with the traditional software installation is, the updation may not always support the hardware compatibility or operating system. Getting new versions of the software is a kind of headache when installed on your local machines. That possibility now does not exist. You don’t need to update it manually and it is automatically upgraded over the internet. Everything is taken care of for you…!
Creating a SaaS device management platform
The SaaS market and its revenue are growing day by day. If you try to imagine a real roadmap for developing a SaaS device management platform, then this article can be helpful for you. You might have seen people on the internet saying, creating SaaS doesn’t require coding. But the SaaS application development should be done in the right way. You need a balanced approach in the development process.
The amalgamation of good ideas, realistic points of view, visionary thinking, and diligence plays an important role in developing a SaaS platform. Let’s see how to complete the development through these steps.
Idea development
The long-term success of your SaaS product depends upon making sure that you have potential customers or subscribers. If you get a person or a company that spends money on the app then you can collect resources to build your SaaS product. The people around you will think that your product is fantastic but would a random person love your SaaS? You need to narrow down your target audience. You need to make sure that the customers are willing to pay the price of your SaaS. You should test your idea and perform marketing research, so you don’t have to get a painful lesson later.
Right product and pricing
Apart from a few common things in software development, you need to build a basic foundation for a viable product. e.g., nowadays customers expect security of their data. So high-security measures you should apply for the product. Once you know the exact needs of the client, then you have to optimize your software. As we discussed earlier, you can charge the organization or a person with annual, monthly, or perpetual subscriptions. Your product pricing can be categorized in the following formats. Freemium, flat rates, pricing per feature or user, etc. Adjusting your pricing model according to the target user’s needs can benefit you in confirming the deal.
Right features and viability
If you want to make a difference in the SaaS industry, then you need to assess the market and its trends. With minimal costs, you can create a valuable product. Feature prioritization is important. On the basis of which you can build a minimum viable product. You should know the outline of the viability of the SaaS product. User-friendliness, performance, security, and actions to solve a software problem are some of the factors to be considered. Adding value to your SaaS product is more important than adding features to the product.
Alignment with the key SaaS metrics
You need to decide what metrics are good for your business goals, on the basis of which you will measure your product success. While focusing on your end goal, you need to do small frequent arrangements, that can increase excessive overheads. For that purpose, you need to consider some metrics and KPIs. You have to determine customer usage. Then you should see how many customers subscribe or unsubscribe in a certain period of time. What amount do you spend on acquiring a customer (CAC)? How would you launch the SaaS product in the market and how it will compete with your competitors? Your customers should get value from the product (NPS) that score should be above 50%.
Final product launch
After assessment of requirements, research, design, development & testing, you can think of the final launch. Marketing of the SaaS product is the ultimate strategy of the company that requires sales, business processes, content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, and advertising. To reach out to the target customer base and generate revenue, you have to deal with the sales team. After the development of the product, it is the responsibility of customer success managers, sales representatives, and sales engineers to increase the conversion rate. Users feel supported if you provide initial SaaS use training. Product demos help prospective clients understand better. If the sales department is always there to look after the customer’s needs, then it creates amiability.
Success measurement and feedback
Software as a service is a complex, creative and time-consuming process. The proper vision, guidelines, and objectives are needed to develop a SaaS. Once your product rocks the market, there is no time to sit back and relax. Because your product is the reflection of your hard work. You apply user metrics and KPIs to build a product ecosystem, that success is measured on the basis of user feedback and the after-sales process. Only real customers can give authentic feedback. They give you an insight if your product is doing well, needs an update, if all features working fine, is useful according to the expectations, and so on. The success of any product depends upon the value you provide to the customers.
If you are new to the SaaS concept and you don’t want to go through the process of creating an application from scratch, you can always take the help from third-party services. There are several companies that provide SaaS application development services based on your custom requirements. Yalantis is one such company that can help you to create personalised SaaS software from scratch or convert an existing software into a cloud-based SaaS application.
Conclusion
Customer satisfaction is the building block of your SaaS product objective. Revenue generation comes later. Assessment and addressing the customer needs is a kind of half work done. The development of a SaaS product always looks like an adventure. A lot of creativity and improvisation are needed to get succeed in developing a SaaS product. Everything depends upon how would you see challenges and convert them into your opportunities to offer a better SaaS to the subscribers.
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