For app builders adopting the SaaS model is more beneficial in terms of time to market, revenue generation, scalability and ease of adding features or functionalities as per customer demands. But building a SaaS application can be quite a roller coaster ride. These are few handy steps which can help you fast track and plan your SaaS building process:

1. Market research:

After detailed market research, think carefully about the product or service features that you are going to provide in your SaaS app to draw user attention. To think about core product features that should be a part of your app, you must know how to write a system requirement specification (SRS) document properly. An experienced software development team will do due diligence and write a detailed SRS document which will further help in a hassle free planning and project execution.

2. User Research and prototyping:

Once you have a decided on the feature set for your MVP you can start your design process. The design need to both aesthetic and user friendly to make it appealing to end users.

Prototyping with wireframes can help you validate user stories and find any loopholes in the user journeys. Once the wireframes tick all the right boxes, they can be converted into aesthetic and pleasing UI. Your application should not just be functional, it also need to appeal to user. UI designers add a dash of colour and bring the screens to life with typography, fonts, icons, illustrations and graphics.

3. Choose the right technology stack:

Zeroing in on the right technology stack for your SaaS is the most critical aspect of developing SaaS application. Technology stack can have a major impact on the roadmap of your SaaS. Not every programming language will be suitable for building the application.

There are several factors that need to be factored in such as compatibility with the middleware, devops tools, front-end and back-end frameworks or libraries. The selection of technologies can also have serious repercussion on the cost, scalability, ability to add feature sets. Considering long term support for your customers you will also have to look at the support and maintenance for the chosen technologies.

Python and MERN are popular choice for building scalable cross platform SaaS apps.

4. Build a MVP:

With agile development you can start building your application with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). A MVP has just the basic functioning features and services for the application to work. It is like a trimmed down version of the full-scale application for early users.

Rolling out a MVP can help iron our any chinks in the SaaS application. Feedback and lessons from these early users can help in further development of your application. The user feedback and experience from MVP can also act as a baseline for what new features need to be added later.

5. Scale:

Once you have validated your MVP you can focus on scaling up your application. This will happen two fold. Firstly it will be addition of more features and services to your application and secondly you will also need to bring in new infrastructure like additional cloud servers, payment integration etc. to accommodate new functionalities and users.

Once your MVP is shipped you will also have to provide application updates to users without disrupting their working and their application data. Using devops you can even plan and automate delivery of feature updates for your cloud application.

6. Work with a skilled team:

When building SaaS applications you will often need professionals like business analysts, designers, software developers, mobile app developers, quality assurance engineers and project managers. Once you go through the important SaaS development phases like project planning, cost estimation, and chalking out the development roadmap; the next critical step is having skilled SaaS developers in your team.

If your existing team is not ready to tackle the development duties, then an experienced product development company can bring a lot of opportunities to improve your SaaS product development due to their in-depth domain knowledge and experience related to SaaS development.

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