How Should Businesses Strategize Their SaaS Product Development Approaches?

“Subscription-based pricing model. Pay-for-use basis. One-to-many consumption architecture. With such offerings, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Product development fits the face of digital enterprises.” 

Agility, elasticity, and scalability are the traits that enable enterprises to thrive in correspondence with the continuously changing customer preferences and business demands. However, innumerable technology innovations brighten the business streets. Still, SaaS seems to be brimming with solutions enterprises need to reinvent the IT landscape and push their digital transformation endeavor a notch higher.

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the economic framework, disrupted the regular workflow, and highlighted the need to build a hybrid virtual model. is highlighted. According to a survey done by Gartner, “74% of companies plan to shift to more remote work post-COVID-19 permanently.” It is important to understand that creating a hybrid virtual model has more meaning than just shifting a part of the workforce to perform business tasks remotely. A hybrid virtual model means:

• Reduced infrastructure requirements
• Low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) 
• Faster access to skills
• Improved employee experiences 
• Increased productivity, and more.

Considering these modern business requirements and the need to have a hybrid virtual model, businesses, in large numbers, are approaching SaaS product development providers to develop go-to solutions. At a juncture, when the pandemic forced business operations to halt, the cloud helped ensure business continuity, which resulted in a spike in demand. Among the three different cloud services forms, i.e., SaaS, IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), and PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), SaaS continues to be the largest segment. According to another report by Gartner, the market for SaaS is to reach $104.7 Billion in 2020 and $140.7 Billion by 2022. 

The market across the countries is volatile due to the pandemic. Businesses must think beyond digital and initiate a more profound digital transformation as the COVID-19 impacts infold. It is time when the integration of applications and collaboration of software and tools is key to surviving the digital race and gaining competitive advantages. Amidst the volatility, businesses can leverage SaaS to turn the market and the digital-age customers in their favor. 

Understanding SaaS and learning why businesses mostly outsource SaaS Product Development 

 SaaS product development is an approach that allows businesses to reduce dependency on on-premises legacy suites.

• Businesses no longer require to install software locally, host a server, or maintain a large in-house IT team.
• Third-parties host software and allow access to users over the internet. 
• Companies don’t have to own software or buy a license to use one.
• From application development, integration to software tools collaboration, everything is done in the cloud.
• SaaS is subscription-based, functions with a pay-as-you-go model, and above all, the service is remotely available.
  
  Summarily, SaaS is about breaking the conventional norms and carving a roadmap to agility and continuous innovation. The service is perfectly suited to serve the digital-age customers, who demand business availability and accessibility anytime, anywhere across the devices and platforms. 
  
  Businesses usually collaborate with a SaaS Product development company to further save time and costs. Outsourcing SaaS product development means running your business stress-free and from even remote locations without any hassles. In a collaborative partnership with a SaaS Product development service providers, both startups and already established companies can lean on the providers for virtually all their IT and software requirements. They do not have to bother about:
• Coding experts and developers 
• In-house IT architecture
• Technology experts
• Hardware installation 
• Software updates and upgrade
• Market trends
  
  Many SaaS application development companies offer a global delivery network, multi-engagement models, flexible pricing, and 24*7 maintenance, support, and security. Leveraging its distributed architecture, SaaS providers allow businesses to scale up and scale down resources as per their requirements. Thus, it won’t be wrong to say that outsourcing SaaS product development helps companies seamlessly complete their journey from on-premises to on-demand and keep all their time and efforts free to deliver full customer value.

 5 steps to strategize your SaaS Product Development 

When compared to on-premise software deployments, the SaaS product development approach has helped businesses gain high-strategic value. According to a report, by 2021, 73% of companies plan to leverage SaaS for their application needs. There are innumerable factors that drive the adoption of SaaS among businesses from across the industry. It helps reduce software deployment time from months and weeks to few minutes, improve employee engagement, and enhance customer experiences. Therefore, it becomes paramount to learn the steps to strategies your SaaS product development.

1. Market Analysis and Research
   Businesses must monitor market trends, competitors, and customers’ behavior to ensure the success of SaaS product development strategies. The early adopters of digital transformation use technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), data analytics, and more to build predictive capabilities to understand customers’ demand in advance. Technologies help you consolidate the data coming in from different sources and extract valuable, actionable insights on what your competitors are up to, the trending software, what products and services would fit into the improved customer-experience criteria. With the right insights readily available, it becomes convenient for business to validate their idea and map it with SaaS product development strategies. 
2. Defining the Business Model and Budget
   One solution never fits all businesses, and that’s a common fact. Prudent organizations must consider the nature of their work, analyzes the organizational maturity level, and defines the integration landscape before seeking SaaS development. Investments may go in vain if you don’t have a defined objective. With a clear understanding of business models and budget capabilities, businesses can easily choose technologies they aim to invest in and functions and features they want to incorporate into their SaaS-based products and services. It enables businesses to use SaaS Application Development platforms to build customized,  customer-centric, and result-oriented solutions. 
3. Creating Minimum Viable Products (MVPs)
   Before developing applications leveraging SaaS platforms, it is always wise for businesses to create prototypes and minimum viable products (MVPs). These are possibly the best measures to ideate on value addition and map your upcoming products with user flow. MVPs are a vital factor while building SaaS strategies as it directly reaches potential product users. Based on the feedback, companies can easily understand how customers have responded to their idea of products and, thus, focus on adding core functionalities and enhancement to ensure that the final product delivers meaning. 
4. Set Your SaaS Product Pricing Strategies Right 
   Once you are done with the steps mentioned above, building pricing strategies to ensure customers agree to pay what you demand is essential. SaaS product development companies have multi-pricing models to offer, including per-user pricing, value-based (considered to be the best), tiered-user, flat-rate (the most common), freemium, per-storage, featured-based, and pay-as-you-go. Pricing strategies should put customer empathy at the center. In other words, it is crucial to analyze whether the product that you plan to offer is apt enough to solve customers’ problems or provide a viable solution. Monetization is a growth lever, which is still untapped. You would be surprised to learn that only 12.70% of the SaaS adopters think pricing can make their product a success. However, it is 4x more efficient than acquisitions, informs a report by Forbes. 
5. Develop Go-To-Market Strategies 
   When all the above-discussed metrics are in line, it is finally time to build robust go-to-market (GTM) strategies. It essentially helps businesses hit the market at the most appropriate time and reach out to potential buyers. To make the GTM efficient, companies must focus on creating intuitive user experiences. They can Outsource their Software Development and collaborate with leading digital transformation providers. It would help them choose the right technology stack, including APIs churns data to make data-driven decisions, reach the target audience, and set the sales and marketing strategies for their products, right.  

   SaaS Product Development: Turnkey to shape the future of work

   Cloud adoption has gained momentum, and so has the SaaS product development platforms. When the pandemic started to unfold, Microsoft reported that the users for software facilitating online collaboration increased by 40% in just a week, according to an article published in the NY Times. Such reports support the statements that platforms such as SaaS essentially helped shift to what is familiar as ‘the new normal’ and allowed many businesses to ensure continuity.
   
   Amidst social distancing and lockdown commotion, most businesses approach SaaS Product development services providers to leverage web-based technology to continue with their operations remotely. In the coming years, cloud computing spending is to rise by 6.3% Year-on-Year (YoY), and SaaS is to grow at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 12%. When businesses are forging work-from-home (WFH) and remote working models to fit in the new world, the continuous increase in the demand for SaaS should not come as a surprise.