Four things your new SaaS app must have

Recently I’ve had a fair number of people get in touch saying they’re starting SaaS businesses and wanting to pick my brains.

It makes me feel like a bit of a fraud if I’m honest.

The modest success of KashFlow, my SaaS accounting software company, has been mainly down to hard work by other people and some very lucky timing as opposed to any great planning, foresight or execution on my part.

However, a recent conversation threw up an interesting question: what are the essential elements of any SaaS application?

Here’s my stab at an answer

1) An API

In todays world of interconnected applications, an API isn’t optional. It’s right at the top of my list of must-haves for a number of reasons.

Having an API means lots of other applications can integrate with yours, making your product a more compelling offering as well as potentially giving you access to other companies customer bases.

The more applications in your ecosystem that a customer uses, the less likely they are to jump ship.

And your API has to be free (some silly sausage here tried to charge users £99/year for it and it set us back quite a bit) and fully functional (I know a number of our integrated apps have been approached by a competitor and they’ve not been able to integrate because they have a less than comprehensive API)

2) A Free Trial

You must provide a free, fully functioning trial of your software. And it must be available instantly.

Some sites make you fill in a form and they then get back to you when the trial is ready for you. That’s just plain silly. Either they’re wasting time trying to filter out competitors (if they want to see it, they’ll see it) or they need some manual intervention to get you up and running (not scalable and probably not real SaaS)

3) A White Label Option

This is something we didn’t factor in at the very beginning and had to retrofit (not fun). If you can provide your software on a white label basis (some times called ‘private label’) you’ll find a whole raft of opportunities to sell your product via different channels.

To make your application available on a white label basis you’ll need to be able to totally eliminate your company/product name from the application, including in address bars. Don’t get precious about your brand, get precious about license fees!

4) Stunning Design/UI

This one will raise some eyebrows with anyone familiar with KashFlow. We’re not the best looking application on the web by any means. This is because I’m a techie and designed the initial interface. Techies don’t do beautiful design. At best we do functional design.

It’s an area of our product we’re working on improving. But changing the UI when you have an established customer base of thousands of users is a delicate thing. Get it right at the outset. It really matters

Would you agree those 4 are essentials? Have I missed anything? Feel free to add your thoughts using the comment box below.

http://www.rypenow.com Blair

Duane, couldn’t agree more. I think you have nailed it in regards to the must haves. On the API front, I just had to fill in a manual form for Quickbooks (Reckon Australia admittedly) to “apply” for their API which I then have to pay an annual fee for. Talk about not getting it.

Keep up the good work!

p.s. Like your honesty re the Interface – function over form huh?
http://www.mattchedit.com/Blog.aspx Matt Chatterley

I definitely agree on the bulk of these points – certainly, in our case, two (if not more) in-house projects have grown into what I would consider “SaaS” applications BECAUSE we worked towards adding an API.

All they are really pending in the control panel allowing user signups for the trial and we’ll be away. Our eCommerce platform is currently being re-released as part of this work, including changes under the hood to permit it to be used via API as an “engine” which can be brought into existing sites.

I think #4 is probably more of a general comment these days – we are so used to the web, that it is getting harder and harder to impress, but pure usability normally surpasses impressive looks in the end.

White-labelling is an important aspect, often overlooked – and was the main force behind driving us to build APIs – at the end of the day, we are techies, and we’d much rather provide solutions to others who are better placed to resell them to a wider market!
http://www.KashFlow.co.uk Duane Jackson

Thanks for the comments.

@Matt, an API isn’t a substitute for having your system white-label-able. wouldn’t your potential partners still have to write their own front-end?
James Murphy

In terms of the design/ui – what you need is useability. If that comes as eye-candy too so much the better but the key is that the system has to be useable.

Possibly you need pretty stuff up front to attract new users but the key is can a user do what they need reasonably effectively.

Pragmatically you beat the living daylights out of the payroll system I’m using but you’re some distance from the way quicken was on my desktop. More challenging is that to make some things better you’re also going to have to make them different – possibly subtly different (which is actually worse but that’s life as a developer…)
John Donnelly

As one who is a real stickler for a good UI (just ask my colleagues) I do spend an awful lot of time getting my apps (albeit desktop as opposed to web based) to look as good as they can.

However, I do think that, ultimately, it does come down to usability and features. Whilst a superb looking application will attract users to begin with (I recently downloaded a trial of an application that, from the screenshots looked stunning, one of the best UI’s I’ve ever seen), in use the program was awful and the screen constantly flickered and refreshed making it all but unusable over a period of time.

On the other hand, I’ll use the example of Sage Line 100 which, as a DOS based application looked awful compared to a lot of software but, was easy and very fast for the end user and still sold way beyond the time it should have been pensioned off.

John
http://www.mattchedit.com/Blog.aspx Matt Chatterley

@Duane, partially, but the systems I’m talking about are more “accelerators” or “modules” for existing software, rather than complete pieces – so they plug in via API to add functionality.

There’s an administrative front-end, which (I hope) will soon be white-label friendly, though. Yes – essentially the “client” has to build something on their end to interact, but from our point of view the “something” which they build tends to vary a lot so we can only provide examples, really!

It’s a bit of a funny example and we’ve never actually been sure if we should classify them as “SaaS” or not, however, they’re software and provided on a service basis 😉

I can’t wait for 6-8 weeks time when I can stop being so vague about it, too!
Gavin Henry

Same here Blair. We’re just enabling ours: http://forums.kashflow.com/techie-table/18567-any-developers-around-know-what-restful-web-service-api.html but was looking at https://oneapi.aepona.com/sec/portal/tws_gsma/Info/GSMA+OneAPI which I had to register for! Ours will be open!
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