How to build a successful SAAS company from zero Part : 3

Now that you have shipped your first version of your software, it’s time to gather feedbacks. Gather all requests and you need to start filtering what and which feature is the most beneficial and cost effecting to build for long term.

You will also need to decide to either call the shots ( meaning selling how the software works ) or let the customer call the shots ( meaning developing a customise version for specific customers ). Either way, it’s still a SAAS but only a different business model.

When you call the shots, you gather all feedbacks and feature requests and you decide which one to build. This will allow the market to filter itself towards your software. In other words you don’t have too many version of one software. But then again this model will also have a fix price on the features that you are selling. The market will then go for the features and price most suitable for them. It’s a less headache approach towards SAAS as you don’t need to worry about troubleshooting multiple clients on multiple features. It also gives you the flexibility to decide when to build the next feature of your software.

When you let your customer call the shots, you are moving towards ‘customisation’ business model. You can charge for those specific feature requests, that’s the pros. Those customisation costs can save you time in looking for new clients on your ‘You call the shots’ business model. But the cons are you need to make sure your developer knows what he or she is doing, otherwise you will end up troubleshooting endlessly and therefore loosing money on developing those features. Worse is client gives up and you’re left hanging with a half baked software features that’s only limited to certain market segment or clients.

Now that you have made your choice on which business model move ahead, the next step is to start fine tuning your BETA version of your software. On the next part, we will talk about how to choose the right developer and right technology so you don’t suffer from scaling your software when your business or client base grows.