SaaS, or Software As A Service, is a software provided to users in a paid way, and as a developer, starting your own SaaS is a good way to make money, passively.
There are literally “unlimited” ideas for a SaaS project, it depends on many factors and the most important ones are:
- The niche your software is going to be in
- The audience you are targeting, or your potential future users
- The problem you are trying to solve
Choosing the right idea & validating the market demand
A successful SaaS needs to solve one or multiple problems. Briefly, this is how the SaaS economy works:
- Firstly, people encounter a certain problem
- Developer finds out that some people are encountering this problem, and then researches for a way to solve it
- Once the solution is found, it needs to be automated, thus a software can be created for this
- With the software ready and live, a payment module needs to be implemented, so users will need to pay to use the service to solve the initial problem. Payment can be either one-time or subscription based.
Finding the right idea, or the right problem is not a hard task, after all, everyone of us is encountering a new problem daily, so for this, you need to encounter the right problem, and try to find an automated solution for it. The niche that this problem falls in is quite important as well, as it will determine your future “clients”, and by determine i mean:
- How many users you will have in your SaaS project
- Their buying power, this will be a good factor for setting your SaaS price
- How bad they want to use your SaaS to solve their problem, this will also play a huge role on setting the price of your SaaS
Some ideas on how to find a good SaaS idea:
- Browse the web and see what SaaS are there, this will help you see how the software is build, and determine the price for each problem, and how it is being marketed
- Use tools like Similarweb to check the SaaS performance
- Try to highlight the tools that people need to use regularly ( Tools like PDF editors, Images editors, etc … )
Tech stack recommendations for building a scalable SaaS
Choosing a tech stack can be tricky as well. There are various tech stacks that you can chose from, and basically each one can be used to transform your SaaS from an idea to a usable software, but what changes are the factors, such as time, complexity and efficiency.
You need to determine, in a conception way, how your software will work, and what is required to build it.
- Does it need a database ? or just pure algorithms ?
- Does it need an external API that users can use ?
- Does it need an efficient frontend with a good UI/UX ?
These are few factors that can determine which technologies you should use for the software. If you want to learn more about tech stacks, you can read this post about MERN stack.
Monetize your software
Once the software is built, you need to monetize it. For this, you need to integrate a payment module into your software, and you can use one out of many available out there, a quick suggestion, Stripe, a very popular and easy-to-integrate payment processor that can assist you build a monetization strategy for the software.
Usually, SaaS requires its users to have a subscription payment plan, so, as a developer, you will be earning money passively as long as your software is online and the users are satisfied by the result your software is providing.
Attracting users
The software is up, and ready to on board users. But the issue now, is, simply, how to find these users ?
Generally speaking, marketing can be done in one of these two ways, or both :
- Organically, without paying a cent, just sharing on the internet and waiting for internet users to find out about your service
- Paid, by using ads services, such as Facebook ads, Instagram ads, etc … These big ads network can bring you thousands of leads that are already interested in your product, and these leads can be turned to clients easily since they are already interested.
You can mix the two ways to generate more leads, and more clients. But to start, you can rely only on organic marketing, so you have to work on your site SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) and create social media content. People will start noticing your product, and you will start getting some visits.
To increase your search presence, try creating a blog area where you write posts regularly, these posts should be informative in the niche of your software, and they should speak about, either the problem your software is solving or a sub-problem, that can also be solved directly or indirectly by your software. Either way, you will be attracting readers that are facing the problem your software solves, or a similar one.
Once you start getting registrations, and hopefully subscriptions, now you can introduce some other marketing strategies like:
- Affiliate marketing: give a certain commission to people that bring you new users
- Social media marketing: buy posts or reels in big social media pages, or influencers.
- Create attractive deals – make promotions and giveaways to attract more users to your software.
Conclusion
These are the necessary steps to start your SaaS. Once done, you need to keep maintaining the software and improving it to keep in the competition, use a good CRM software to keep the clients engaged and improve based on their feedback.
