How to Build a Cloud-Based SaaS Application in 10 Steps

With simple business procedures, new setups and SME organizations may adore the perks of Cloud-based SaaS use cases such as Accounting and Auditing, Project Management, CRM, ERP, or Email Marketing Package. Whatever SaaS solutions businesses necessitate, SaaS offers a range of web-based applications that are diversely accessible (for free). Office 365, SAP Concur, Dropbox, Salesforce, Google G Suite (Apps), and Zoom are other well-known Cloud-Based SaaS Applications.

SaaS can help your company become more successful, efficient, and collaborative across geographies by putting commercial software applications over the cloud network. Many companies with traditional integrations have converted to SaaS in order to grow their software requirements as the number of employees deviates.

Getting inspired? Is your firm also looking for an innovative solution? This guide has bought you ten straightforward stages to create SaaS Application. Let us dive in!

What is a SaaS Application?

Let us first understand SaaS systematically before headfirst on how to build a SaaS product. SaaS applications are basically centralised accommodated, customised, web-based software. Obtainability, security, and routine application gateway are all coped with by the cloud service providers.

For instance, a bank is a suitable analogy for the SaaS delivery model that preserves privacy and provides secure facilities to its consumers who are dependent on this model. These customers utilise standardised financial processes while being in the SaaS infrastructure along with the technologies that care about authorised and unauthorised data/information access. This bank could receive the following elements of the SaaS delivery model.

Multiple-Tenant Architecture. One of the primary elements of the SaaS delivery model is an architecture where SaaS users, end users, stakeholders, and SaaS developers share a common network to maintain the model. The maintenance occurs under centralised standards that are usually showcased as code written in programming languages – understandable by SaaS developers.
Simple Customisation. A subsequent element of the SaaS model in a bank infrastructure would be no off-shell product but on-demand software that could meet business needs.
Improved Access. Lastly, anyone can retrieve improved data from shared networks while accessing simplified and controlled rights, keeping track of data usage, and guarantying reliable information.

SaaS utilises the end user’s internet! The emblematic SaaS web app is like My Yahoo or Amazon Web Services (Amazon.com experience. The best thing about these apps is tactics allowing easy customisation with frequent (say within months or weeks) upgrades in integrations.

Advantages of Building a SaaS Product

Small to large enterprises build SaaS applications to have a lot of benefits. To list a few, this section has covered some of the prominent benefits companies may relish within a SaaS environment.

You can have Access to Cloud-Based Sophisticated Applications. In order to let customers use on-demand integrated applications, SaaS offers kinds of applications that require no installation, update, and management. Even the most complicated software these days are affordable to anyone who requires SaaS integration in their business structure. The catch is if your business lacks in acquiring, deploying, and maintaining requirements, SaaS can meet the gaps.
You Only Pay for The Feature You Need/Use. With SaaS, you can save money by using off-shell, customised, and on-demand products depending on your business needs.
You may Instantly Mobilise your Staff using SaaS. Since you can access and create SaaS applications from anywhere anytime, you can quickly mobilise your staff (their technical efforts) within moments. With SaaS-based applications, you do not need to worry about rebuilding or maintaining your application. All you need to do is get relax about your acquired product.

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Types of SaaS applications

When it comes to SaaS applications the list is limitless. However, to discuss a few, the following are the most industry-leading SaaS integrations that most businesses are incorporating these days.

CRM Software

The Customer Relationship Management integration of SaaS manages and tracks users’ data through automating sales, compiling business information collaboratively and interacting with customers in person.

ERP Integration

The Enterprise Resource Planning applications involve various functionalities. These functionalities cover system efficiency and load-balancing techniques.

Accounting & Auditing

To keep the business finance-related data and its management organized in a proper manner, this kind of software tracks out the business activities throughout the month to conclude with growing opportunities for business.

Advanced SaaS Project Management

These kinds of the software ensure the standard process of business management, monitored by the project manager. Using this software, anyone can plan their project life cycle, manage SaaS project schedules, and allocate internal & external resources while meeting SaaS project deadlines under specified budget and scope with high-quality results.

Email Marketing & Automation

To do the email job successfully, one must optimize and automate the message delivery for all potential customers. Email-related software ensures it meets this client’s requirements.

Examples of B2B / B2C SaaS Applications

To mention a few, some of the most renowned examples of Business-to-Business and Business-to-Customer applications of Software as a Service are:

Concur
Slack
Microsoft Office 365
Dropbox

SaaS App Development in Ten Steps

Wondering how to build a SaaS application? Follow these simple steps, along with the provided tips and tricks within each heading.

Step 1. Idea Generation and Validation

Know the truth of this world – every solution that exists in this world is to solve (most or at least one) problem whether digital or physical. When it comes to SaaS application development, you can also bring a solution that can solve issues related to SaaS. For instance, the following are a few SaaS platform inherited use cases:

Reddit and Facebook Groups that provide users with searching and exploring options
Quora let people browse questions in order to know the interest of users.
Apps that pay attention to the chat of professional and personal lives of people.
Drawing conclusions from other experiences.

All you need to do is start digging the seed (idea) as deeper as demanded. For instance, we got the idea and wanted to let people know the steps of building SaaS applications. Most people can read this guide and go with their custom SaaS solutions journey. But people with no knowledge of SaaS won’t use this guide. Therefore, while providing the steps, we also covered SaaS platform-related other terminologies in order to help all readers in their knowledge and integration process.

Step 2. Planning

So, you have explored your idea in the first step. In the next step, you need to brainstorm possible solutions that can go with your identified problem. Your brainstormed ideas may involve:

Review existing solutions to your identified problem
Find shortfalls in the existing solutions
Discuss your idea with technical professionals
Ask customer-centric questions and know the possible answers
Find customers who need your proposed solution and have a 1:1 discussion with them. This will help you know the future of your intended solution.

Whatever solution you choose for building SaaS applications, always remember niches get rich with the reference of time. No solution in this world is useless.

Step 3. Discovery Phase

Now is the time to discover what will you do. Make a summary document covering your estimated budget, predicted market size and sales forecasts for at least three years. You can call this document a business plan which may point out:

Your unique selling proposition USP
Your identified problem and intended solution
Your market niche and target market
Your competitors
Your partners
Your revenue-generating model
Your Minimum Viable Product (MBP)

Step 4. Application Design

Design is the most important aspect of building SaaS applications. Without a user-friendly design, your proposed solution won’t sell – no matter what kind of market segment you have.

3 most significant SaaS app design considerations are:

Mobile app navigation – If you are building SaaS mobile apps, including all types of well-organised navigations in order to make your application appealing.
Typography in SaaS applications – Make your typo readable, clear and always convenient to human and computer eyes.
Colour schemes – Not only a SaaS platform application but all types of business applications require standard design and choices of colors.

Since most people are technical experts and most organisations do not have a designing team or department in your firm, you can acquire professional UX and UI design services.

Step 5. Architecture Design

Building SaaS applications is not an easy task most beginners think. It requires a solution that meets the complexity issues and security challenges. While meeting these cloud challenges, you have to meet your company policies, along with defined compliance standards and security practices. Not only this but meeting SaaS’s also perfect architecture requires excessive knowledge of cloud infrastructure.

Here are a few tips for you to execute this phase properly in your journey of building SaaS applications.

For security purposes and compliance requirements, make sure to conduct due diligence on your SaaS delivery model.
Once you conduct due diligence, determine your data’s sensitivity and protection standards.
Legalise your cloud infrastructure by blocking not necessary solutions. This will prevent shadow technologies in your solution while ensuing lite use cases of your defined architecture.
Ensure cloud endpoints protection using SaaS-compatible technologies for your proposed solution.
Know the mutual understanding between the cloud service provider and your company to ensure you are doing your part correctly.

Step 6. Software Development

With the perks of SaaS applications, there are some aspects that most web software development services practice. For a cloud-ready SaaS platform development, you must also remember the following points.

Leverage microservices (cycles of each module in a proposed solution) architecture in your SaaS app development.
Compartmentalize data accessibility in order to manage as little raw data as possible.
Remain thrifty with application layers amid data exchange across zones.
Use cloud scaling approaches to differentiate between vertical and horizontal components.
Include security features in particular for your software design.

The same strategy goes for professional fintech software development services. Professionals keep these practices in order to meet the canons of SDLC.

Step 7. QA and UX Testing

After evolving your software, you need to test your (to be) developed SaaS application. There are various tools for Quality Assurance (QA) and User Experience (UX) testing that perform really well in the cloud environment. Some of the tools that companies (whether small and large) use for SaaS performance checking and stress & load testing in a cloud environment are:

AppPerfect
Cloudslueth
CloudTestGo
Jmeter
LoadStorm
SOASTA CloudTest

Other security tools for SaaS platform development that are mostly used in the cloud are Wireshark, Nessus, & Nmap.

Step 8. Deploy

At this stage, get DevOps support and launch your product. This stage requires the involvement of a strategic approach. The approach could be anything. As per the organisation’s standards, your product should follow and rely on your organisation’s defined business processes, marketing tactics and sales analogies. This is important because you want your consumers to know the SaaS platform development completely and value it in marketing-let. Your product at this stage works as an authorised digital asset that has a sales focus. Some approaches for you:

Customer Onboarding: Provide your customers with an initial training/manual of SaaS platform development software to help them use your product.
Products Demos: Make interactive videos on each module to share with your consumers for a better understanding of your deployed SaaS application.
Sales: Design pitch decks, sales decks, and promotional plans to display your application in front of your target audience.
Marketing: How will people know about your product? Of course, with marketing. Participate in SEO or PPC marketing so that people get aware of your product. You can also offer free trials to get customers involved.

Step 9. App Maintenance and Further Development

Nothing in this world is perfect! Even with the most appealing objects such as the moon, there are some dark spots that we use to see and praise. The same goes for SaaS applications.

Even after professional QA, you may encounter complexities in your deployed SaaS model. You may face issues with your applied approaches in your design and development phase. Whatever you encounter, make sure to maintain your delivered model. Not only does maintenance ensure a better user experience, but it also opens opportunities for further SaaS app development. How come?

When agreeing with a company for SaaS application development, you should ask them for a maintenance package. At the meeting, if you get the project, along with the maintenance, you can simply impress your client (organisation) and receive further development requirements within the deployed application.

Step 10: Product Scaling

Gather your consumers’ feedback and measure your solution’s success!

The stage is straightforward. After deploying your SaaS application in the market, you need to decide on your solution’s success. Determine your SaaS application, its success metrics and KPIs to report and analyse the post-launch lifespan of your product.

Your success measures may include:

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Churn
Revenue generation model

What’s more? It is important to review your consumers’ feedback on your deployed SaaS version. People mostly share feedbacks that define the functionalities of your SaaS-delivered product, its upgrades and useability.

Creating a SaaS solution is a complicated, creative, as well as dynamic process. There seem to be no clear-cut laws but following these recommendations and criteria can assist your goods in success. On a one hand, it requires a superhuman sense of professionalism to keep the faith and keep to a goal while building a successful SaaS firm. On either hand, it necessitates adaptability and understanding as you get more. To establish a product that satisfactorily serves the needs of your customers, you must frequently modify your perspective, be imaginative, and pivot.

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Things to Keep in Mind When Developing a SaaS Application

In a SaaS development process, make sure to keep the following pointers in your mind.

Technology Stack

In the SaaS development process, the technology stack is an important thing you should forget. Know that the right approaches always result in the right directions. In order to acquire technical support (tech stack) for SaaS application development and deployment, you need to partner with SaaS providers. Like full-stack developers, This collaboration will lead to featuring your SaaS application and its demand on the cloud market.

Tenancy Model

This business model is based on single and multi-tenant databases. These two databases aren’t distinct. Both databases are interlinked in tenancy mode. Here is how!

A Single-tenant model deals with various customers in a multi-tenant model. However, the multi-tenancy model ensures secure transactions, consumer privacy and data security for tenants who isolate the SaaS approaches. This is because the approach has boundless benefits like

Reduced cost
Increased efficiency
Easier management
Increased scalability

Pricing Strategy

Companies’ monthly or annual subscription payments to use SaaS programmes are considerably easier to arrange. SaaS solutions generally offer the ability to adjust or terminate the membership.

Capital expenditures such as network and hardware, as well as paying employees to operate the application, are likewise reduced. Apart from the lower initial expenses associated with establishing and implementing the system (which must relate to other software applications), SaaS also results in lower upkeep.

Compensation pricing schemes allow businesses to pay only about what they use, reducing the need for large licence payments.

What are the Costs of Software as a Service Development?

Obviously, there seems to be no simple solution. The cost might range from $20,000 and $700,000 or more. It really doesn’t seem like a set price, does that really? The cost of building a SaaS product is always determined by a plethora of elements that already have a greater or lesser influence.

Additional Expenses
API Inclusion of the Launchpad Tech Decisions
Cost estimation
Establishing Deadlines
The Characteristics
The scope of your SaaS application

The important functions are those that enable your solution to achieve its goal. Every new feature you wish to include raises the cost of SaaS developing apps. As a result, start with the fundamentals.

Cost Defined by Types of Teams

Type 1. In-House Development Team

For reserving a house team in SaaS application development, you may get your resources as well as money utilised. Unlike traditional software development, SaaS cost you depending on the product demand.

Type 2. Local Development Agency

When you are worried about how to build a software platform due to cost-effective constraints, acquiring local agencies for minimal cost can help you with cost management.

Type 3. Freelance SaaS Developers

The third team is freelance and sometimes a remote worker. You can always hire SaaS software developers online using freelance sites like Upwork, Fiverr, people per hour or simply freelance.com.

Type 4. Outsource Development Agency

When you don’t have in-house expertise, you hire outsourced agencies for your cloud or SaaS-based applications and functionalities.

How to Find a Reliable SaaS Development Partner?

Are you still wondering how to build a SaaS application? Don’t wonder! The procedure to build a SaaS application is simple. No matter if you don’t have the skills to develop and integrate SaaS applications. You can always find a reputable SaaS development partner whether online or onsite. How come? Review the SaaS web applications providers of various software as a service development service provider and choose the one. To execute the job perfectly, there are simply three ways to decide on the best partner!

Tip 1. Expertise

The first and the most important aspect of choosing the software as a service development partner is the expertise. While reviewing the site, see how many skills their team has, along with the quality of their skill set. Acquiring a certificate in SaaS development and publishing it on the website is everyone’s cup of tea. Proving the skill set depending on the required services is what sets a pedant apart from others.

Tip 2. SaaS Project Portfolio

Review the SaaS project portfolio of the service that has passed the expertise level you want. SaaS Project portfolio will help you analyse the strategic approaches and the worth of the company in the market. See

What kind of services do they offer?
How do they build their applications?
What security measures have been followed by each company?
What are their revenue models?
What are their potential customers saying about them?
What do normal customers think about them?
How is the experience of consumers, end-users and stakeholders with each company?

There is a lot more to think about and consider about the SaaS project portfolio. Some companies might look perfect in SaaS application development, but they may habit of delaying most SaaS projects. Scenarios like this can get your SaaS project, idea, or proposed solution at risk or even a failure. Therefore, do not take risks over the portfolios.

Tip 3. Successful SaaS built

Finally, the success rates in SaaS application development. Aside from all the services you see on the websites of Cloud service providers. Only consider their SaaS applications menu and check are they best suited for your next application. Do they have 101 expertise for your proposed solution? Or are they capable of meeting your requirement set? Etc.

Have a SaaS Development Idea?

Are you still feeling puzzled about how to build a SaaS application? Don’t worry!

Do you have a SaaS Development Idea? Our dedicated development teams with SaaS cloud-based are waiting for you!

At doCode, we help our clientele in initialisation, design, development, delivery, and everything in between software as service development. The best part about our services to build a SaaS product lies in the delivery.

We take no more than a year to deploy the proposed solution for our client. In our professional experience of 5 years, we have never disappointed our clients for what they ask us for. We always ensure diversified solutions and their delivery so that we can meet the competitive edge of technological war.

Read more: How to choose an app development company

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How to Build a Cloud-Based SaaS Application in 10 Steps