This is purposed to be a growing list of Guiding Principles for designing and building SaaS Products.
Feel free to comment..
End user support is the hidden ongoing cost that will kill your business, so…
- Make your product self supporting
- Engage in ongoing and deliberate support reducing techniques
Any human-to-human correspondence with potential clients is expensive,so…
- Answer every question your potential clients might have, at the time when they are likely asking those questions (see “moment-of-relevance“)
- Enable clients to sign-up, free-trial, pay and get support online
- Provide a platform for community support
- Think really, really, really hard about publishing any phone numbers, email addresses or even email forms. Avoid this if you can.
A little bit of money from many clients is much better than a lot of money from a very few, so…
- Plan for a mass market - marketing, support, infrastructure (see multi-tenant architecture)
- Price cheap (or “inexpensive” if you prefer that term)
