Weekly dose for SaaS entrepreneurs

Running a SaaS business gets us thinking too much about automating things, increasing visitors to our site or managing our conversion funnel etc. that we sometimes forget that people are actually purchasing our services. Let it be known that human beings are inherently social. They want to connect with people, services and the brands they use on a daily basis. The most important mistake you can make is not to build deep relationships with your customers - even if you have thousands of them using your app for free.

Find a way to get in touch with people using your app - learn from them, connect with them on Twitter/ Facebook and most importantly, listen to them. As the world becomes increasingly virtual, your edge is the bring back ’social’ in your business.

Do you know how valuable are your customers? If you have 3 pricing plans (lets say bronze, silver, gold) you should not only calculate the churn rate on each individual plans but also keep a track of the time customers stay on the plan and the average you earn throughout their lifetime from being your customers. Calculating this should be a monthly ritual and is simple assuming your bronze plan is $10 per month:

…converting existing software to web-based.

It is the entire web experience you are going to give your customers from coming to your site, trying out your app, paying for it and interacting with your company for support, help, referrals etc. If you consider yourself a SaaS provider, what you really need to focus on is the ’service’ aspect of SaaS and not just the ’software’.

As SaaS gets common and a way of consuming software, what will set one provider from the other will NOT be the software or the features but the overall experience that they can deliver to convert and keep a ’stateless’ web visitor to a long-lasting paid customer.

Here is a quick checklist (in no particular order) on some of the things people are going to look for in your SaaS application:

Easy signup
Matches current and future feature requirements
Comparison with competitors
Pricing
Ease of use
Support options
Online demos and help pages
Company information
Security information
Social mentions and users reviews via blogs, twitter, facebook
Integration with other software/apps
Videos (marketing as well as help)
Current customers
Casestudies

Do you think of anything else?

Good article by Sinclair Schuller of Apprenda for GigaOm. Here, he outlines what it takes to be a serious SaaS player. It is more than just putting out a web application out there. Read on…

The growth of the cloud community and the appetite for cloud-based software options over the past few years has been remarkable, although not unexpected. The SaaS model offers two distinct competitive advantages for software developers — massive economies of scale and sustainable profit streams –- over the traditional model. Yet astoundingly, many firms take the plunge into providing SaaS without understanding the underlying requirements necessary to ensure success.

Read more…