Startup Resources

On top of your chosen development stack to create and develop out your SaaS solution, you are going to need ways to manage:

• User Support – a dedicated email address is a good start, but moving to using helpdesk software, such as Zendesk, allows you to scale better and keep track of issues easier.
• Email – be it in-app transactional messages that need to be triggered, sending new feature news to users, or general marketing emails, a dedicated email marketing platform will be required at some point.
• Project planning – your development plans will need to be tracked and organised to allow developers to focus on building what’s needed.
• Payment management – where it’s automated billing or invoiced based, you will need a way for your users to pay you. Ready made payment processors can integrate with your application and accounting software will help you keep track of payments and provide invoicing functionality.
• Marketing tools – how are your potential users going to find you? Even building and promoting your website will require some tools, otherwise the time spent doing everything manually takes you away from building your product.

Startups can be grown in a few ways:

• Bootstrapping – self building and funding your startup
• Investment – taking investment from an Angel fund or VC to enable quicker expansion and development of your startup
• Loan – businesses can take loans from banks (or dedicatedly focused startup funds/institutes) to acquire a lump sum of capital to grown their business
• Funding/Grants – depending on your location and your Startup’s focus, you many be eligible to receive a grant from your government, a charity or a corporate entity to build out your Startup

Firstly, assess what the core functionality of your solution is; what benefit is it giving your users? What features are the most important to them to become paying users?

Once you know your core offering, you can supplement its functionality through using ready-made products, designed to do a set task.

You need to add payment facilities in your app? Don’t build it from scratch, use a ready made option like Stripe or Chargebee.

You need to offer users flexible dashboards? There are tools you can include in your product that will allow you to launch the feature in a fraction of the time.

Your customers want to be able to integrate your tool with their business software? You can offer them that functionality from within your application through using an embedded iPaaS, so they can be created and deployed using low-code tools – so your developers can focus on building out your core application’s functionality.