MVPs help companies build features or small products to unleash valuable customer experience. Many failed MVPs are bets and experiments that companies make to discover novel opportunities for building and growing their business.

However, building your MVP can be a harder task than it seems, there are many things beneath the surface that need attention. Here we look at some of the most common MVP pitfalls and how these can be mitigated: 

1. No Business Model

If you operate without a business model, it will make your MVP unsustainable in the long run. You cannot depend on VCs to carry the day for you. A good MVP operates with a thorough understanding of the business models. Great products reimagine business models in creative ways to give them the edge in a technology-driven world. 

A good business model can help you understand the cost implications for your customers and the value proposition your MVP delivers.

Can you create a new business model which can increase the value, but reduce the costs for your customers?
What are the top value creators in the business?
What are the cost drivers for your clients?
Is your MVP addressing the most critical parts of the client’s business?

A good MVP starts with a thorough understanding of the resources, key business activities, partnerships, costs and profits for a business. The MVP addresses the gaps in the existing market and unmet needs of the customer that create value.

2. Engineering a Mediocre MVP

A mediocre or a technologically deficient MVP doesn’t move the needle. Once you identify the core need that has to be addressed with your MVP, engineering a good MVP is important.

A mediocre MVP has too many features, distracts users, has poor workflows and doesn’t help users accomplish their key tasks.

When a user spends time on your product without achieving anything significant, it spells doom for your MVP.

A good MVP interacts with the users. It can be a very small feature which is focused on a small set of users, but ultimately it should add value. For e.g. Calendly is an appointment scheduler, but it makes appointment scheduling smooth and transparent. It also links to your chosen email provider.

Calendly makes appointments easier than before for the top executives saving their time and reminding them about their important calendar of events. It lets people avoid back and forth exchanges on email to set-up appointments by a dynamic scheduler. 

A good MVP works well for the use cases it covers. It doesnt leave gaps in user experience, which can drive customers away. When customers interact with your product and they can get things done, they would use your MVP more often. But if the product doesn’t work properly, shows inconsistent messages, and leaves users frustrated, you cannot expect your product to generate traction even with the best sales teams.

3. Market Test

Most people get excited about the things they’re building. But the market is the place where your product can be tested, it is the reality check.

No company can survive without a real market for its products. Many enterprise customers spend far too much time building their MVPs in silos and delay the launch of their products. 

Without launching your product in the market, you will never know the response of your product. Good MVPs are built when companies understand the psyche of the customers for whom they’re building the MVP. If a product owner or the CEO has faced the problem firsthand, his experience helps in building the right product. It can then be tested with a few pilot customers before things can take a concrete shape.

Never trust a pilot customer who tells you that your product is good, but never uses it. No one would tell you on your face that you’ve built a crap product. It doesn’t work like this. But the willingness of the customer to pay for your product is the best feedback for its acceptance.

Here are some important questions that need to be addressed in your strategic roadmap: 

How quickly can you build your product prototype (8 weeks or so)?
Can you launch your MVP to get market feedback using the existing distribution channels?
Are you in the right market?
Do you have customers who are paying for your product?

4. Technology Adoption Curve

New technologies can solve business problems more efficiently than before. It creates an opens up new market opportunities for companies. When an MVP is developed that is either too much ahead of the curve or lags behind the state-of-the-art technology, it fails to win customers.

A competent team understands the right blend of technology and business to deliver functional MVPs for companies.

Getting the right technology for the MVP is an important aspect. Even though an MVP is typically launched in 6-12 weeks and gives your company the opportunity to see its feasibility, good technological choices can make or break your MVP.

When the technology is good, it makes things seamless, efficient, and fluid. It works like magic and delights customers. 

When companies understand the inflection points in technology, they understand what technologies will be able to create a telling difference. For e.g. finance and accounting industries have a shortage of bookkeepers, accountants, and CPAs. With the advancement of AI & machine learning algorithms and banking APIs, it is now possible to develop an MVP to automate bookkeeping completely and generate all accounting reports.

Recognizing the right window of opportunity in your industry or space to launch an MVP makes the difference.

5. Paying or Pilot Customers 

There is a notion that if a customer is paying you for your product, you take the money and build the product. It may not be the best approach though if you want to scale your MVP.

By targeting the wrong customer base, you can often dilute your product at an early stage. It can derail your product roadmap, add clutter and technical deficiencies to your product.

You cannot cater to all customers, in all segments and all locations with your MVP. Even companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix didn’t scale up overnight to serve billions of customers. 

Your target profile and customers will determine the success of your product. As per pareto principle, 20% of customer segments will be able to give you 80% of your targeted customers. Focus on the right customer segment and the right target market.

A good market has growth opportunities to scale as you grow your customer base. It takes time to build a delightful MVP. By focusing on a smaller customer segment, you can build an MVP that can serve your customers better. 

Take time to understand the problem of your customers deeply. 

What makes your customer’s life miserable specifically?
How often do they face the problem?
How they are currently fixing their problem?
What options do they have to solve their problem?
What do the customers gain by solving this problem?
What are the consequences of not solving this problem?
What is their idea of a perfect solution for their problem?

When you build an MVP for your customers with the understanding of the above, you can deliver a much better MVP. If the customers don’t care about the problem you are trying to solve, you can talk to your customers to figure out where to focus your efforts.

6. Not Being Useful

When you build an MVP, you should be doing it to serve your customers not to showcase who you are. Is your product truly useful for the customer? If not, no one will care to use it. They will sign-up for the trials, but they wouldn’t ever use your product.

Getting in the custom’s shoes is the first step in building something useful for them. 

How does your MVP help your customer? More importantly, are your customers aware of it? Because, customers never use the products that serve no value for them. No one wants to spend their time in giving feedback or trying new products unless it is useful for them.

Successful MVPs unleash tangible value and help customers achieve their desired outcomes. Companies need to figure out ways to uncover value for their customers and measure on how their MVP is doing. The MVP could use some data points to assess how customers perceive your product: 

The HEART framework stands for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success. Things that get measured get improved.

A good MVP can be iterated and improved with real data points and focused efforts quickly. An MVP that is useful for the customers links features to client’s desired goals and value.

For e.g. a marketing automation product could lead to 40% more qualified leads every month. It serves a useful purpose for clients and is tangibly linked to the number of leads every month.

Kreyon Systems provides MVP development for clients globally. If you have any queries or need help in building your MVP, please reach out to us.

The post Building Your MVP: How to Avoid Common MVP Pitfalls Step by Step  appeared first on Kreyon Systems | Blog | Software Company | Software Development | Software Design.

Effective SaaS development requires careful evaluation, prioritizing & alignment with business goals. Organizations need to choose the right development metrics, stay nimble, and focus on meeting the business needs. SaaS development processes shape products and online services for companies today.

Here’s a look at the heuristics for SaaS development to optimise resources, exploit the potent technological inflexion points and increase product life to meet market demands.

1. Positive Frame of Mind 

Software development can be a chaotic job, dealing with unknown changes, technological shifts and ever-increasing market demands is not easy. A lot of developers choose to complain and whine. However, the best one learn, adapt and continue to stay updated with the demands of the industry. 

A positive outlook is an oft overlooked, but important skill for building quality products and services. Teams that are building something truly valuable need to zone into the right mindset before they can deliver the results. 

If you spend a significant portion of their day working, would you like to do something you don’t like? Building a good product team requires a strong culture of learning and passionate team members who love their work. 

2. Readability of Code
Collaboration is the key to a successful team effort, however, enforcing it at the code level can be hard. SaaS development needs efforts from multiple software developers, architects, & UX designers among others.

Reading the code of others is an important skill that developers need to master. More often than not, developers spend more time reading code than writing it. So, readability of code rates among the top qualities for SaaS development.

The best teams enforce standards and best practices for writing standardised code. They use design patterns, coding standards, comments and structured roadmap to ensure consistency for their development efforts. The attrition in software industry was over 20% in 2021, and expected to rise higher in 2022. So new developers often have to work on a legacy codebase, hence it is advisable to improve the readability of code for quality SaaS development.

3. Reversibility

One of the key engineering principles in software engineering is reversibility. It implies a software system that has built-in processes to undo any or all steps and move to a previous state. There are no final decisions as there are too many parameters, changes are frequent and manageability is critical.

Reversibility ensures that the enterprise application maintains information of each stage and can go back to a previous stage without any loss of information in a consistent way. There is a single source of truth for the complete application. Every action or change of information is recorded and the system can be reversed to a previous stage, if need be. 

A reversible system may also log information that could be used for troubleshooting any errors or exceptions. All the states are stored in persistent storage & the interactions are free from the state management complexity. Every action can be reversed, which makes error detection and fixing easier as well. 

4. Prototyping & Architecture:

The architecture of a SaaS application has a significant role in its scalability. A lot of times organizations are looking to experiment and launch new ideas for their customers using quick SaaS product prototypes. The early stage prototypes can be used for building full fledged SaaS products to serve a large customer base.

Here is a look at some of the architectural decisions for SaaS development

Are major components of your SaaS application well defined and appropriate?
How do the major components interact with each other?
Is coupling between different components/modules minimized?
Are there potential sources of duplication, can you list them?
Are interface definitions & constraints clearly documented?
Does every component or module have an access path to the data, when it executes?
Is the user environment and workload clear?
What are the preconditions, postconditions, and invariants for the SaaS application?
How often would the SaaS application need to be updated?
What are the security considerations for user data?
What are the compliance needs and regulatory guidelines for the data?

A breakdown of the key requirements of the SaaS application can help the product teams to make the right architectural decisions. The SaaS development needs to deal with uncertainties and frequent changes, but organized and clear information with real-time needs of users is of immense value to deliver a scalable application. 

5. Development Environment

The developers cannot afford to work in isolation. They need to coordinate and collaborate with the team to deliver their work is in synch with the needs of the projects on real time basis.

It is important for teams to set-up the development environment where teams get upto date emails about development check-ins realtime. The development environment and work in progress need to be in synch. All development work must be tested and integrated with the latest application codebase. There is a growing need to integrate, test and keep developers in loop with each others work.

The build engineer/product owner has to ensure that the development environment is set-up and resolve any code conflicts to ensure consistency. The build process, accessing the latest codebase, key information and integrations etc. need to be automated using centralized processes. 

6. Product Design & UX 

Product design and user experiences influence the adoption of your app significantly. A simple and intuitive user interface reduces adoption barriers for the SaaS application. When a product provides cues and nudges to help users what they wish to accomplish, users are more likely to come back to the SaaS application.

The product design influences the user decisions and helps them achieve their tasks using focused screens. The emphasis is on UI design that helps users to operate the product intuitively. The application provides validations, checks and balances for users to make progressive efforts for the time spent on the product.

Minimal product designs start with the end-users in mind. It helps team build focused products that have tangible impact on what their customers are looking to achieve. Design thinking & lean product development approaches don’t add features unless there is strong customer demand for them.

7. Systems Thinking

For effective SaaS development, companies need to develop systems to optimise every stage of development. Teams need to ensure all developments are aligned with maximizing business impact and delivering customer value.

Teams cannot spend too much time on development cycles and build things in a silo. It is imperative to get the individual parts to integrate with the overall application and receive customer feedback in the user environment at the earliest.

Systems thinking employs processes at every stage to gather feedback, collect usage data, and build robust mechanisms to help the organisation achieve its goals. Systems thinking employs processes for creating development stories, test cases, refactoring codebase, integrations, collecting usage data etc. 

8. SaaS Platform Administration

SaaS development can be improved significantly by creating visible systems and processes. The SaaS platform administration manages development, deployment and monitoring activities such as new sign-ups, onboarding new users, email marketing campaigns, renewals, managing data etc.

SaaS Administration Activities

User profile management: Managing the list of all active users on the platform
Sign-ups: These are the new customer/users who sign up on the platform
Application and Data Security: The application and data needs to be secured using GDPR or HIPAA(Medical apps) should be defined and implemented from the initial phase in the system.
Trial Management & Updation Plan: How is your application trial period managed and configured? How can users update and become paid customers?
Billing Management: How do users pay for their subscriptions on the system? How is the process managed.
Third Party Integrations: What are the third party applications that need to be integrated to your SaaS application?
Platform Specifications: What are the supported platforms for your SaaS application? Do you have separate mobile apps for Android, iOS & Windows? Which browsers are supported?
API Management: Which third party applications use your APIs? Do you have an API guide for third-party developers/applications?
Interactive Support: How are users supported on your SaaS application?
Profiling & Optimizing: How is your application performance benchmarked, managed and optimised?
Platform Usage Statistics: What is the total number of users, conversions and usage patterns of your applications? How do you measure customer churn? 

SaaS development using innovative processes can help companies develop market winning products and solutions. With the product lifetime reduced due to ongoing technological disruptions, well orchestrated SaaS development processes and innovations are bankable growth opportunities for companies.

Kreyon Systems is a SaaS product company. If you have any queries for us or need help in SaaS development, please reach out to us.

The post The Ultimate Heuristics for Effective SaaS Development appeared first on Kreyon Systems | Blog | Software Company | Software Development | Software Design.

1. Target Group & Market

Choosing the right market precedes choosing the right customer. A product strategy defines and nails the target market, customer and the outcomes they are looking to achieve. 

One of the golden rules of product strategy is to never work on features that no one is willing to pay for. A good product strategy aligns the team with the vision and helps them develop the best solution for the customers. Targeting the right group of customers requires measuring and defining metrics for the product. Some important questions that are addressed by the product strategy:

Who is our customer?
What is the problem we are solving for our customer?
Who is not our customer?
How do we measure success of our product with well-defined metrics? 

Many product teams are focused on adding features without understanding the key requirements of the product. The product development shouldn’t be driven by the product managers or the development team, but by the customer and the market.

The software developers and engineering teams accomplish the best solutions when they are well versed with the customer problem they need to solve. A good product strategy articulates the need with clarity and gets everyone on the same page. It helps the team deliver the key outcomes customers value & are willing to pay for.

The founders of Airbnb posted a few photos of their apartment on a simple webpage to test the proof of concept. A simple way to test your target customer market and how you can address them goes a long way in articulating the defining your product strategy.

2. New Business Model
An innovative business model can go a long way in creating a differentiated product that customers would notice. When Netflix was a DVD rental company, they operated from a store and rented out DVDs to their customers. It faced a lot of competition from existing players in the industry, they soon started DVD rental over the web. The DVDs were delivered through mail. Yes, this was back in the days when bandwidth didn’t allow video streaming like today.

The company again reinvented itself with a new streaming-based platform for reaching customers around the globe. Uber disrupted the taxi industry by offering a cheaper, faster and more convenient online service.

A strong product strategy looks for ways to disrupt an industry. It asks questions like, how we can revolutionize an industry? What are the ways we can monetize our product without charging more from customers?

An innovative business model analyses the target customer segment and its impact on the business. For e.g. can we eliminate the least profitable segment of our customers? Do we need to serve smaller markets or focus on bigger markets with quality customers? How we can reach a bigger scale for the product without affecting the quality of service to customers?

3. Distribution & Sales

Businesses that scale-up develop innovative distribution strategies to find customers. These could include SaaS product platforms, freemium users, enterprise or government customers etc.

A good product strategy helps teams reach more customers by making the product distribution easier and seamless. For e.g. 90% of Skype customers don’t pay, it means only 10% of customers pay for Skype subscription. But by introducing the product for free, Skype generates its revenue. The company also doesnt incur any infrastructure cost like telecommunication companies. The Skype customer service and support is done in a highly automated way reducing costs.

Technology changes things, it makes a revolutionary impact and reaches scale quicker. For e.g. Chrome launched by Google targeted faster-browsing speeds. It aimed at 10X improvement over existing browsers, similarly when Gmail was launched, it offered an unprecedented improvement over the competition to reach more customers at a bigger scale. 

4. Key Partners


Gone are the days of building things in a silo, today even companies like Apple & Microsoft are opening up their ecosystem to collaborate with others. The key partners for a product can help its visibility, distribution and even offer complimentary value. For e.g. many accounting software needs to be interoperable with tax-filing utilities to provide the last mile service for their customers. 

Salesforce provides a development platform for third party developers and apps. These apps can be hosted on the Salesforce platform and availed by the Salesforce customers. It offers a valuable addition to the Salesforce customers as well as third-party developers to reach more customers.

The platform companies like Youtube, Medium, and Netflix are also incentivizing content creators. The key partners for a product strategy explore the possibilities of maximizing the network effects of a given platform. The product strategy involves ways in which key partners can be integrated into the ecosystem. The development, marketing and outreach efforts are the key partners are vital components of a good product strategy.

5. Technology Capabilities

The technology capabilities and competency of a team go a long way in building the right products. There are many examples of products that scaled prematurely like Pandora and could sustain themselves when facing the heat.

The product strategy outlines the core competencies of the team. It evaluates questions like:

What are the core technology strengths of our team?
How can we build market-leading products?
How well do we receive market feedback to adapt?
What are the innovations that can give us the edge over others?
What are the product technology risks for us and how we can avoid them?
Is our team reskilling itself for the future?
How quickly do we adapt to the market & technology changes?
How do we manage the talent pool of workers and attrition?
What is the basis for our product innovation efforts and how it is measured?
Is our product offering meeting the unmet needs of the customers?

The technology capabilities help teams crack the unaddressed customer problems or provide a better solution than an existing one. The speed of execution, focus & ability to think ahead provides an edge to product teams.

6. Orchestrating Business Functions


Most product teams that fail build things in a silo. They don’t understand the overall picture and how they need to address the customer problems. The marketing, development, sales, distribution, customer service, support, and new opportunity management etc. has to be in synch for building the right product. A good product strategy has a unifying impact, it rallies everyone together and enforces a shared vision for the team.

A good product strategy brings product thinking into the team. Many development teams simply want to add features, fix bugs and do mundane work without deep involvement. But the product strategy is driven at the core by engineering a better product for the customers. It is understanding the overall picture that the product serves and contributing to it. Successful product teams operate with a holistic view of what they are building, but ordinary teams only focus on what they are trying to build now to fill their days.

7. Value Innovation 

Good product teams are focused on their customers, not the competition. While it is easy to copy other products and play the catch-up game, it rarely works. Value innovation identifies what customers value the most and the underserved opportunities for which they are willing to pay.

The term innovation can be vague and may mean different things to different people. However, when the context is clear and the value metrics are defined, innovation takes a different meaning. For e.g. Cisco created routers & network devices with a 60% margin, they uncovered the value innovation with superior products. Value innovation can have a decisive impact on the product & create demand for it. 

HP’s mantra epitomizes value innovation succinctly, “When performance is measured by results.” It simply states that it doesn’t matter what you have done and all the features you’ve added unless it solves a problem for the customer.

Kreyon Systems is a SaaS product company. If you have any queries for us or need help in building SaaS products, please reach out to us.

The post SaaS Product Strategy: Principles and Basics of SaaS Product Strategy  appeared first on Kreyon Systems | Blog | Software Company | Software Development | Software Design.

The SaaS product companies are tapping into new avenues for product development & business. Here we look at some of the recent trends for SaaS product development.

The post SaaS Product Development: 7 Trends for Building Great SaaS Products appeared first on Kreyon Systems | Blog | Software Company | Software Development | Software Design.

Most of the Unicorns owe their success to creative marketing strategies that helped them build their business from a valuation of 0 to $1billion. Here’s a look at the most effective SaaS product marketing strategies used by Unicorns:

1. Content Development

A sound marketing strategy revolves around its content. The content development strategy outlines what is in it for the customers. A good content strategy provides customers what they’re looking for to solve their problems.
Before you zone into the content development, answer the following to create relevant, focused and valuable content for your users.

Your target customer: Whom are you selling and solving the problem for?
Problem: What is their current problem?
Outcome: What the customer can accomplish using your product?
Risk: Why you believe you can solve this problem better than other alternatives
Long-term gains: What is the long-term impact of solving this problem?

A good content strategy provides thoughtful answers for its customer’s pain points. It captures the essence of their needs and helps them accomplish their goals.

2. Hand Holding for Frictionless Adoption

One of the biggest differences between companies that make it big and others, who don’t, lies in their approach to their product adoption. Take for e.g. the case of Etsy, it is a $2 billion public company which allows artists to sell their creations on its platform.

The company started in 2005 and it created a marketplace where buyers and sellers could transact seamlessly. The founders went to every artisan flea market, understood what the artists were looking for and helped them list their items on their platform. They, like many founders who build scalable companies, worked with the actual users and customers on the platform.

Frictionless support needs careful evaluation of the needs of the users. A platform like eBay wasn’t meeting the needs of the artists. But Etsy worked with the artisans and ensured they covered things end to end to get them registered on the platform. This frictionless support and doing the groundwork is what separates the best SaaS products. Frictionless adoption of a SaaS product by working with the real users is an unbeatable marketing strategy for any business.

3. Location

A SaaS product can be adopted by users and customers around the world. But zoning into a specific location and user
base helps the team solve things end to end for them. Take for e.g. Facebook ads, the product ads are tailored to the user location. The currency, the pricing and the messaging are targeted according to the location of the users.
Most SaaS products that scale up are built with a targeted user base. When a product can dominate in a specific location and solve the problem for the users, it can scale up to serve other locations as well. Etsy solved the problem for its local artisans first, Uber offered its app to nearby conference participants and FB started from a campus.

A specific niche, location and user base can help define marketing precisely for your SaaS product. It will also provide your team the opportunity to gather feedback firsthand and interact with the customers of the product.

4. Leveraging Unfair Competitive Advantage

Companies that make it big often have a secret sauce that they can leverage to their advantage. It gives them a thrust
and opening to a wide market base, which pushes them to great heights. It could be your location, team, unique products, culture or execution. Whatever gives you an edge over your competition must be communicated with clarity in your marketing messages.

What is your main competitive advantage that puts your competitors at a disadvantage?
Why would a customer prefer your business over your competitors?

5. Growth Partners

Breakthrough SaaS products are often built and marketed creatively. The innovative marketing strategies can be used for targeting the customers. Understand the behavioral patterns of your customers, where they hang out. You need to build a strategy to reach out to them with strong partnerships. For e.g. if you’re offering a SaaS product for travelers, you could consider partnerships with travel agencies. If you’re targeting students, you could consider tie-ups with schools and universities.

SaaS products can be marketed through affiliate partners with mutually benefits. Depending on the type of business, industry, locations and your customer profiles, your company can build innovative outreach strategies for customers.

6. Innovative Monetization

Most customers would prefer to use the products for free, whenever they can. Free is a powerful way to get the customers to use your products. However, you can build innovative monetization strategies to build your business.
Government departments have been increasingly adopting the SaaS products for their day to day operations.

However, the traditional users of their systems are prone to legacy approaches for data upkeep. Some companies are experimenting with fees for digitization of documents, this provides an additional services revenue component and also helps the departments get their things done.

Solar energy companies are now offering their products on rental models compared to traditional ownership based models. Many SaaS companies are offering free products and charging for services like accounting, bookkeeping etc.
With innovative monetization models, the customer cost of acquisition is reduced significantly. They can reap the benefits of innovation & even tell others about it.

7. Breakthrough Offerings

The disruptions offer one of the best ways to market your products. When the customers get something unique, they can become your loyal brand advocates. When Spotify launched its online music service, it allowed users to listen to their favorite songs at a low monthly subscription fee. It changed the way music was bought. Earlier, users had to pay for purchasing albums or songs, but with a low monthly fee they could listen to unlimited songs.

The best SaaS products that go on to become Unicorns often change the business models of their industries. The disruptive offerings develop new ways for customers to achieve what they want, increase their engagement and establish a dominant market position.

Kreyon Systems is a global SaaS company. If you have any queries for us or need help in implementation of SaaS products, please reach out to us.

The post The Most Effective SaaS Product Marketing Strategies Used by Unicorns appeared first on Kreyon Systems | Blog | Software Company | Software Development | Software Design.

SaaS product management can be the difference between its success & failure. As technologies and business needs change, how a product evolves to meet its user needs depends on how it is managed. Good product management is proactive, forward looking and has deep connection with its customers. It creates a roadmap that translates customer needs into features, solves their most hard pressing problems and provides them a tool to get things done.

SaaS product management is the art of dealing with complexity, chaos and constant changes, but keeping things streamlined. It works with an influx of innovations, ideas and problems to deliver compelling solutions that make SaaS products indispensable. Here’s a guide to SaaS product management from the experts:

1. Understanding Customer Needs

The most important element of building a good SaaS product is a deep understanding of what the customer needs. You cannot guess and anticipate the needs of the customers. Figure out a way to connect with your customers to learn more about their needs, their environment and reasons why they use your SaaS product.

Customer needs can be understood using some of the following:

i) Usage Analytics
Track the features used by customers and study the patterns of what they are trying to accomplish.

ii) Time Spent
How much time is spent by the users on your product?
What is the frequency of their usage?

iii) Alternatives
What are the alternatives for customers to get things done, if they were not using your product?

iv) Interactive Support
Is your product interactive enough for customers to articulate what they need. Do you have means to collect surveys and opinions of the product users? How often do you have customer calls & review meetings?

2. High Impact Work

Time and resources are limited. It is better to develop things that create the highest impact for the customers than trying to do everything & being average with things. SaaS product management requires careful analysis to zone into the highest priorities of the customers.

Customers prefer SaaS products that are the best of the breed. In a way, if your product is an email campaign tool, it should help customers run campaigns better than any other product. Customers love products that help them do things better. It doesn’t matter, if you have fewer features than other products, as long as your features are better.  There is a book on product management, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. The core philosophy of the book can be summarized as-Less but better.

Know the problem you’re solving for the customer, how you are solving it better than your competitors & the desired outcomes for the users.

3. Feedback Loop

SaaS Product management evolves based on the leanings and iterations overtime. Companies that build successful SaaS products understand the importance of prioritizing feedback from customers, sales & marketing teams, help desk support, users & product usage data.

SaaS product managers use prioritization frameworks like Rice, MoSCoW, Kano etc. to plan product developments. The schedules for deliverables are created according to the priorities and expectations of the customers. Every member of the team knows their role in contributing to products overall success.

4. Striking the Balance

SaaS product management is striking the right balance between all the stakeholders. The stakeholders for your products could be:

i) Customers: People who will pay for your product and determine whether it is successful or not. You’re building the product for them and meeting their goals.

ii) Management Team: Your management team is responsible for orchestrating the product teams and providing the resources for building the product.

iii) Users: These are the people who interact with your product. For e.g. accounting professionals in an organisation will be responsible for using your product to create their management reporting etc. Your understanding of the users, their behavior and environment will go a long way in building the right product.

iv) Product Team: Your team will be responsible for building the product; adapting it and making it work in the long run. Building a culture of transparency, trust and open communication can help you steer your product in the right direction.

v) Marketing & Sales: The marketing teams will be able to convey what your product does, for whom the product is built and the expected results from your product. The marketing teams can spread the awareness about the value your product offers. Your sales teams will be able to bring in the revenue from the customers by educating and exciting the customers about it.

vi) Support & Operations: Your support and operations team will work with your customers to provide them the help they need to run your product. Proactive customer support can save a lot of team’s research and development expenses.

vii) Others:  If you are building a product that needs accreditations for security, compliance etc. you will need to go through governments/regulatory authorities to get things approved. There could be legal agreements, supplier contracts, usage agreements, data and security policies etc. that need to be addressed.

SaaS product management coordinates between all the stakeholders, aligns their expectations and engages everyone to contribute to the project success.

5. Measure Customer Value

To build a sustainable SaaS product, a business needs to provide continuous value to its customers. The value creation process needs to be understood and articulated for both product teams & customers. Some of the questions that help product management teams measure customer value:

How are customers deriving value from your SaaS Product?
Why do customers use your product and not alternative options?
What are the switching costs for customers?
How do you measure customer value from your product?
How do you measure customer satisfaction for your product?
What is your product replacing for your customer?

6. Sales & Revenue

Sales and revenue analysis is very much part of SaaS product management today. A key understanding of the conversion rates, the cost to bring in a trial prospect and converting them into a paying customer is integral to developing a better product. Product managers have to keep a pulse of the customers and make the product interactive enough to initiate a sales closure.

Many companies are now depending on the product-led growth. SaaS companies can build products to maximize conversions by carefully instrumented workflows. When product managers understand the resources it takes to get customers onboard, they develop features to retain customers and provide them great value.

Product managers need to be able to assess:
Cost of customer acquisition
Cost of losing a trial customer
Customer Lifetime value
Retention rate of their product
Monthly recurring revenue and expenses

7. Big Picture

While building products, it is necessary not to add features that don’t meet the cut, but there is an increasing need for integrated solutions. Customers prefer vendors and SaaS companies that can offer them end to end experiences for performing their business functions.

Customers are looking at SaaS product offerings that can offer them a complete solution for their needs. For e.g. in business management software, they need the software to do their accounting and provide them with everything they need to run their company. Customers don’t want to end up with too many vendors for different solutions and end up with difficulty to integrate or manage licensing.

Product teams that understand the holistic picture of client needs and business use cases can deliver better SaaS products for them. The big picture involves fitting the pieces of the puzzles together for the customers and helping them become more successful in what they do.

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There is a SaaS product for virtually everything today. Whether it is governments, businesses or consumers, everyone is leveraging SaaS products and solutions in some ways to get things done. SaaS product differentiation helps a business gain competitive advantage, increase adoption and growth. There is a SaaS product already in use or being conceptualised for nearly every process in the world. According to a report from Finances online, the SaaS market will reach a massive $623 billion by the year 2023 at a compound annual growth rate of 18%. 

New SaaS products are being launched by companies everyday. The pandemic has accelerated the pace at which new SaaS products are built and launched by companies. There is an Uber for every conceivable service being developed. The increasing number of SaaS products and applications make positioning and differentiation more important than ever. For 89% of SaaS businesses, new customer acquisition is the top growth activity.

Here’s a look at the strategies to establish SaaS product differentiation and position your company for success:

1. Innovative Features

Does your product have innovative features for the users? Is it better than the existing ones they already use? Is it a new product that will transform their existing processes? Innovation in a product helps it beat its competitors.

Products that are built with innovative features are more likely to get noticed. It is a very strong way to differentiate against existing products in the market. When your product has features and capabilities, it would get the notice and appreciation of customers. 

2. Design Solutions & User Experience

Design has become a quintessential tool for users today. Any customer experience is shaped by how well a product is designed. When a SaaS product helps a customer to solve his problems, navigate complex things and makes it simple for them, it creates a great user experience.

Is your user experience better than your competitors? How are first time users onboarded and likely to use your products? Product experience shapes its appeal to the users. A product that offers rich user experience is likely to be promoted by the users. It creates a differentiation with word of mouth marketing. 

3. Articulate What Your Product is Replacing

SaaS products are typically replacing some existing process in the physical world. Articulating what is being replaced immediately helps your product position itself in the customer’s mind. For e.g. automated telecalling replaces sales agents for generating customer leads. Virtual accounting software replaces your day to day book-keeping services with online options.

When a product is positioned well, customers can see the tangible way it fits into their scheme of things. Good SaaS products help companies improve their capabilities by leveraging automation.  

4. Complete Ecosystem

SaaS products are not sold in a silo. Most customers use best of the breed products for different functionalities in their business. When SaaS products provide integration capabilities and a complete ecosystem, it helps their positioning. For e.g. when customers use business process automation, they may like to integrate it with a payment gateway system, fetch documents from Google docs, or integrate it with their existing business applications.

The best SaaS products are able to integrate and cooperate with other applications. Whether it is a consumer or a business app, complete ecosystem and integrated experience has become a necessity.

5. Customer Success Team

How does your SaaS product support your customer? Is it reactive and responding only to customer complaints and grievances? Or is it proactive and helping your customers win and be successful.

Today, driving your customer’s success is the most effective strategy for differentiation. Why do users opt for your product? Unlock their hard pressing needs and see what it takes for your customers to be successful. How your product can solve issues for the customers that will make them successful. 

Figure out ways to help your customers become more successful when they use your products. Doing this proactively will make customers feel appreciated and connect with your brand.

6. Figure of Merit
Figure of merit is a metric that is often used for comparing similar products. It can be used to communicate how well your product serves the customer. For e..g if a product saves 2 hours of manual time per day or makes a saving of 100$ per person per day. When a SaaS product has a tangible value proposition, it is easier to win the customers. 

Your SaaS product can articulate its value proposition in tangible terms with some of the following metrics for customers:

Process Turnaround Time: How much time does your customer save?
Cost Savings: What are the cost savings?
Meeting Compliances and Regulatory needs: Is it helping them meet regulatory needs for business?Convenience Product: Does it create a better reputation for their business or make it easier for them?
Serving a Niche Segment: Is your product specifically driven to serve a niche segment or industry. For e.g. inventory for the Pharmaceutical industry with QR capabilities.

The figure of merit helps your product articulate its effectiveness in tangible terms for the customers. It can be used as a strong differentiation strategy for not only product positioning, but also guiding its development roadmap in line with customers’ aspirations.

7. A Worthy Cause

Is there a worthy cause behind your product or brand? A product or a brand can be differentiated when it articulates its purpose with clarity. Great brands always give people a cause to root for them. Think of the products that Apple launched and it always positioned itself with a cause, a story and a way to connect with its customers.

For e.g. when Apple launched Mac computer, it provided tools for their customers to do creative work and stand out from others. The customers took pride in being different and it started a loyal following for Apple.

The best brands find ways to establish and build bonds with their customers. They invest in connecting, understanding and serving their customers well.

Kreyon Systems is a leading SaaS development company. If you have any queries for us or need help in implementation of SaaS  based products, please reach out to us.

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The increasing dependence of businesses, governments and consumers on SaaS products augurs well for the growth of the SaaS companies. The pandemic has in many cases driven unexpected growth for SaaS companies. Product led growth is pushing companies to new heights at an unprecedented pace. As per Mckenzie report, 92% of SaaS companies fail within 3 years despite growth and funding. The remaining ones master the art of adaptation, grow at a sustainable pace and stay resilient to the challenges. Here’s a look at the key takeaways from successful SaaS companies.

1. Product Market Fit

According to CB Insights, 42% of startups fail due to poor product-market fit. Companies that are successful are able to build a product for which customers are willing to pay. These companies establish their customer needs with the right product.

The SaaS products that are successful define the core features with precision. These products test their hypothesis with customer feedback. SaaS products that serve their customers well typically answer the following questions about them:
Who they are?
What do they do?
What makes them successful?
What are their pain points?
What does their typical day look like?

Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz have suggested the following definition for product-market fit:
“Product-market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” When there is a good market that is ready & you have a product that can satisfy the market, you can build a successful product around it.

2. Frictionless Experience

The customer acquisition costs for a SaaS product have increased many times in the last few years. Customer onboarding plays an incredibly crucial role in building frictionless experience for them.

Most SaaS products have a high churn rate, the conversion ratio from a trial customer to a paying customer is typically low. Companies that provide hand holding support to the users & help them with their day to day tasks are able to retain their customers longer.

Customer experience and smooth product experience shape the journey of the users. Studies have shown that 44% of companies spend more on customer acquisition than customer retention. Infact, just 18% go the other way. But customer retention is an important metric for SaaS companies. When companies invest in building superior customer experience for the users, the customers can use products with ease and derive greater benefits from them.

Successful SaaS companies follow-up with their customers by sending them emails and scheduling calls to ensure active usage of their products. They ensure that users get the best out of their trial period and do everything to assist them. Companies like Slack have built dedicated training sections for customers to use the software effectively, in addition to its intuitive product & stellar user experience.

3. Smooth Checkout & Recurring Payments

The customer retention rate is one of the keys to building a SaaS company. Companies that have a smooth checkout process and automation for recurring payments are able to reduce the customer churn rate.

Platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc. are great examples of how payments can be done with minimum fuss. These platforms help you create subscription based recurring payments for their products.

SaaS products that are equipped & leverage payment automation are preferred by customers. Many companies have successfully employed annual subscription fee models for their SaaS products. They charge customers one time for the year, but payments are deducted monthly. Payment automation, reminders and automated billing reduces friction for customers.

4. Customer Insights

How organisations plan, understand and use insights from customers makes a great difference. Organisations who listen to their customers often provide them with better products in the process. Great SaaS companies use strategic ways to listen to their customers. For e.g. Salesforce has a conference dedicated to listen to its customers where they share their experiences and aspirations.

Customer insights can unlock great features and capabilities in building better products. Customer service, support and marketing teams can all bring in insights for the product teams to work on. The priorities and roadmap can then be charted by the management teams to serve their customers. Data driven product development efforts are far more effective for building SaaS products than building them in silos without quality customer feedback.

5. Sustainable Growth

One of the highest causes of failures among startups is growth. Yes, you heard it right. When SaaS companies grow too quickly, don’t have the necessary infrastructure, product and capabilities for handling growth, it can create trouble.

SaaS companies that are well funded oftentimes scale up prematurely. It can create unnecessary hurdles for them. When resources are hired at a fast pace, sometimes teams don’t have the right people in right places. Technologically, the product is not architected for exponential growth and the underlying sustainability of the business is questionable.

The successful SaaS companies are built on strong value propositions and sustainability. They have a focused approach of delivering value for their customers, have the right teams in place for building, supporting, marketing and sales of the product. They look at their most important metrics, take a process driven approach and track progress religiously to meet their goals.

6. Switching Costs

The switching costs are the additional efforts & money to switch from your product to another one. Typically there is a learning curb involved when customers use a new product. More often than not, they will not switch, if the effort and costs are high.

Studies have also shown that users and customers typically value something when they have spent efforts on it. For e.g. if your customers have been frequently using your SaaS product, they would value it more compared to products where they didn’t spend time or efforts.

The best SaaS products create triggers for their users. These triggers help users to accomplish tasks and make them feel good. When users spend time and efforts, they are more than likely to continue using the product. A process driven approach to help users accomplish what they want creates a hook for the users.

Kreyon Systems is a SaaS development company with expertise in building end to end ERP, Finance & Accounting, CRM, Lending, Document management & other software products.  If you need any assistance in implementation or have queries for us, please get in touch.

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Software as a Service (SaaS) has emerged as the preferred mode of building software applications today. With the growth of cloud computing platforms, companies are looking to adopt SaaS based approach for building software solutions. Kreyon Systems is a SaaS company with great expertise in building scalable, user centric and multi-tenant software products & SaaS solutions.

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