Lessons for SaaS vendors.. at diversity.net.nz

With a hat tip to Matt, check out this excellent article giving some lessons learnt and thoughts from the authors experience running SaaS businesses. It is in answer to Byron’s Top 10 Laws for Being “SaaS-y”. To summarise, the thoughts/tips are;

Make the revenue - if it means offering 12 months for the price of 10 in order to get the lock in, then do it
Customer service is everything. In a SaaS business, churn is a killer. The way to minimise that churn is to ensure that the customer service you give is exemplary
Analyse the churn - why do customers leave? Is it because they’ve outgrown your offering, or because you didn’t provide what you promised? Don’t change just because a customer asks for it, but be mighty sure you’re delivering what you promise
Use viral - SaaS apps need numbers, the best (and cheapest) way to get numbers for web apps is to market virally
Ensure adoption - given that users can opt out at any time, the sales process isn’t finished once customers sign up - part of the sales process needs to involve ensuring that the customer is really adopting the app - track usage to check this
Stay local - if the vision is global growth, then ensure that sales and support is localised in other markets. Stuff “under the hood” can reside anywhere, but let customers feel like they’re dealing with a local player
Track customer retention - know why a customer adopts your product and ensure that you know why they leave it if and when they do
Think about customisation - it’s tempting to customise your product for one individual customer but SaaS is all about single instances supporting multi tenants. There needs to be a very sound reason to customise your code base out of it’s existing instance

Great advice for SaaS vendors and developers.

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