The world of software development and IT services have operated through well-defined requirements, scope and outcomes. 25 years of experience in software development have enabled IT services company to significantly learn and achieve higher maturity. There are enough patterns and standards that one can leverage in-order to avoid scope-creep and make on-time delivery and quality a reality. This world has a fair order.
It is quite contrary to the Analytics world we operate in. Analytics as an industry itself is a relatively new kid on the block. Analytical outcomes are usually insights generated from historical data viz. a viz. descriptive and inquisitive analysis. With the advent of machine learning, the focus is gradually shifting towards predictive and prescriptive analysis. What usually takes months or weeks in software development usually takes just days in the Analytics world. At best, this chaotic world posits the need for continuous experimentations.
The question enterprises need to ask is “how to leverage the best of both worlds to achieve the desired outcomes?”, “how do we bridge this analytics-software chasm?”
The answers require a fundamental shift in perception and approach towards problem solving and solution building. The time to move from what is generally a PPTware (in the world of analytics) to dashboards and furthermore a robust machine learning platform for predictive and prescriptive analyses needs to be as short as possible. The market is already moving towards this said purpose in the following ways:
Data Lakes – These are on-premise and built mostly with the amalgamation of open source technologies and existing COST software’s – homegrown approach that provides single unified platform for rapid experimentation on data along with capability to move quickly towards scaled solutions
Data Cafes / Hubs – Cloud-based SAAS-based approach that allows everything from data consolidation, analysis to visualizations
Custom niche solutions that serve specific purpose
Over a series of blogs, we will explore the above approaches in detail. These blogs will give you an understanding of how integrated and inter-operable systems rapidly allow you to take your experiments towards scaled solutions, in matter of days and in a collaborative manner.
The beauty and the beast are finally coming together!
Mobile device users are rapidly becoming the user’s favored instruments of choice for browsing the Internet. With market leaders centering on providing customers with exceptional user experiences, we are now seeing a rapid rise in consumer expectations, which compels, including the innovation of the mobile experiences you offer. Just implementing a mobile-first approach isn’t sufficient anymore. While your users may make-do with a responsive website in the early period, a shift to mobile apps provides you substantial leverage over your contemporaries. The key to successful mobile applications isn’t just limited to excellent design and continuous development. The development teams need to speed up the delivery of benefits that mobile apps offer to users. Implementation of the agile procedure, adopting a DevOps strategy, and making a move to the microservices model of creating a cloud-based application gives you a unique business advantage. Microservices enable the development teams to own the entire project development cycle. It provides much-needed flexibility in mobile app development services. Teams can work upon the data collected from users to incorporate changes within the app components on a real-time basis resulting in the DevOps procedure becoming more dynamic and the development teams more agile.
Flexible integration and code creation suit rapidly changing, customer-facing apps, which pushes businesses to evaluate microservices for mobile applications. Microservices in mobile application development boost modularization — breaking the architecture apart into independent services and groups of services. With services lined up around business function and still secluded from each other, developers can deliver the quick updates and recent feature releases that mobile users expect. Since microservices communicate via APIs, mobile application developers can opt for the most appropriate technology stack and language for each service or business flow, instead of limiting the entire project to one. However, microservices aren’t the only way to business mobile app development. Low-code platforms also tout a simple procedure to build mobile apps.
What are Microservices?
Microservices architecture is an essential architectural innovation that is a useful alternative for building complicated software applications. It involves the fragmentation of large applications into loosely coupled smaller services. Each microservice focuses on separate business functionality. Every microservice can be independently deployed, tweaked with, and redeployed without compromising the application integrity — the loose combination of microservices lead to the facilitation of rapid deployments. The features build as a result of user feedback, thus quickly reach the users.
How do microservices differ from conventional development practices?
In the conventional monolithic app architecture, designs all the constituents of the code as a single, cohesive unit in which the constituents are independent and interconnected. Any updates the developers require to make results in alterations made to the whole stack. Adopting a new framework or shifting to a new tech stack needs a substantial overhaul and rewriting of the entire code. In contrast, microservices architecture has the system distributed into individual services that can run as autonomous processes and communicate with each other, utilizing APIs. Containerization enables the encapsulation of the services, and operations run in parallel, thereby making the existing infrastructure easy to maintain. Any changes or updates performed on individual services without affecting the entire system.
Benefits of microservices architecture in app development
Improved productivity and agility
Microservices are made, deployed, and tested individually of other components in the system, which results in enhanced team agility and rapid iteration cycles. The developers have the elasticity to use the framework or language most appropriate for the functionality developed; this ramps up productivity by radically reducing the amount of code to be written. It also increases the maintainability of the application. Breaking down complex apps into manageable services improves the performance of agile teams.
Accelerated velocity and scalability
Scaling of various microservices components at runtime takes place individually; this facilitates more productive resource utilization. We can shift the workload of an element to an infrastructure that is best suited for the task. Microservices offer accelerated development speed combined with on-demand scalability. The flexibility of the cloud-native environments can be effortlessly leveraged by the microservices making scaling cost-effective through optimal use of infrastructural resources. Microservices also ensures that the application is more responsive to market requirements. The agile methodology enables you to roll out robust digital capabilities in response to real-time market requirements.
Continuous deployment
In conventional monolithic systems, dedicated teams work on distinct functions. The introduction of microservices leads to cross-functional teams managing the complete application lifecycle in a continuous delivery model. With various team members, including testers, developers, and operations teams working simultaneously on a development testing, single service and debugging takes place in continual iterations. The incremental development results in a constant cycle which writes, tests, and deploys the code consistently while incorporating relevant feedback.
The rise in cross-functional teams
Carrying out software development and deployment could be a tedious job when, while working with extended teams. Microservices result in improved independence for the developer. They can work independently, resulting in faster decision making. The cross-functional teams in microservices architecture consist of empowered individuals who can make faster decisions. Working in smaller groups and close-knit teams result in more freedom to the individual team members and quicker technical decision making.
Flexibility in utilizing technologies and access to a broader talent pool
Since each developed microservice can be written using different technology, the development team is free to opt for the tech stack that would be most suitable for the specific service. Decoupled services written in various programming languages can easily coexist, add new components continuously, and perform scaling at an individual level. The flexibility that microservices offer also enables you access to a broader talent pool.
Summary
While the business profits of shifting to a microservices architecture are huge, the transformation needs to be sensibly monitored and strategically implemented. Implementing a DevOps culture, with robust monitoring is essential for an effective shift to the microservices architecture. The ramp in flexibility and speed has to balance with an associated increase in complexity.
DevOps is no magic, but it can definitely look like it from the outside. In today’s corporate world, workers in the innovative fields are generating new roles for themselves. The role of the DevOps Engineer is one instance of such. There’s a lot of misconception regarding who is a DevOps Engineer? Are they the person who writes the code or are they responsible for the work of a system engineer? Well! Not exactly. Through this post, I shall guide you through the roles and responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the blend of cultural philosophies, tools, and practices that increases an organization’s ability to deliver services and applications at high speed: evolving and upgrading products at a faster rate than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management procedures.
This speed facilitates organizations to serve their customers better and compete more efficiently in the market. DevOps culture is introduced to create better collaboration, improved communication, and agile relations between the Operations team and the Software Development Team. Under a DevOps model, the gap between the development and operations teams is bridged. Sometimes, the two teams are merged into one team where the engineers work through the entire application lifecycle, from development to test and deployment to operations, and develop a set of skills not limited to a single function.
The teams make use of practices to automate procedures that traditionally have been slow and manual. These tools also support engineers to independently achieve tasks that normally would’ve required help from other teams, and this further enhances a team’s velocity. Simply put, DevOps is a set of practices that combine Software Development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) which intend to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality
Unlike popular opinion, DevOps is not:
a combination of the Development and Operations team.
a tool or a product.
a separate team.
automation.
However, DevOps is a process that includes continuous:
Integration
Development
Testing
Deployment
Monitoring.
Understanding the role of a DevOps Engineer.
The DevOps Engineer is truly a revival of the cloud infrastructure IT services. It is often strenuous to understand this role because the DevOps Engineer is the product of the dynamic workforce that has not yet finished evolving.
DevOps professionals come from a multitude of IT backgrounds and begin the role in different places in their careers. Generally, the role of a DevOps engineer is not as easy as it appears. It requires looking into seamless integration among the teams, successfully and continuously deploying the code. The DevOps approach to software development requires recurring, incremental changes, and DevOps Engineers seldom code from scratch. However, they must understand the fundamentals of software development languages and be thorough with the development tools utilized to make a new code or update the existing one.
A DevOps Engineer will work along with the development team to tackle the coding and scripting needed to connect the elements of the code, such as software development kits (SDKs) or libraries and integrate other components such as messaging tools or SQL data management that is needed to run the software release with operating systems and production infrastructure.
A DevOps Engineer should be able to manage the IT infrastructure in accordance with the supported software code dedicated to multi-tenant or hybrid cloud environments. There’s a need to have a facility for required resources and for procuring the appropriate deployment model, validating the release and monitoring performance. DevOps Engineers could either be the system administrators who have moved into the coding domain or the developers who have moved into operations. Either way, it is a cross-function role that is seeing a huge upward trajectory in the way software is developed and deployed in object-critical applications.
It isn’t rare for DevOps to be called to mentor software developers and architecture teams within an organization to educate them about how to create software that is easily scalable. They also work with the security teams and IT to ensure quality releases. Some DevOps teams include DevSecOps, which bids DevOps principles to driven security measures.
The DevOps Engineer is a significant IT team member as they work with an internal customer. This includes software and application developers, QC personnel, project managers and stakeholders usually from the same organization.
They rarely work with end-users, but keep a “customer first” mindset to comply with the needs of their internal clients. A DevOps Engineer is a customer-service oriented, team player who can arise from a number of different work and educational backgrounds, but through their vivid experience has developed the right skill set to move into DevOps.
Tasks of a DevOps Engineer.
Typically, the role of a DevOps Engineer comprises of the following duties:
Work with a variety of open-source tools and technologies for managing source codes.
Deploying multiple automation tools of DevOps to perfection.
Continuous iteration of software development and testing.
Connect to business and technical goals with alacrity.
Analyze code and communicate descriptive reviews to development teams to ensure a marked improvement in applications and on-time completion of projects.
Design, develop, and implement software integrations based on the user’s review.
Apply cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) computing skills to deploy upgrades and fixes.
Troubleshoot production problems and coordinate with the development team to streamline code deployment.
Conduct systems tests for performance, availability, and security.
Collaborate with team members to improve the company’s engineering tools, data security, systems, and procedures.
Optimize the company’s computing architecture.
Troubleshooting documentation.
Implement automation tools and frameworks (CI/CD pipelines).
Develop and maintain design
Understand the needs and difficulties of a client across development and operations
Formulate solutions that support business, technical strategies and organization’s goals.
Develop solutions encompassing technology, process, and people for continuous delivery, build and release management, infrastructure strategy & operations, a basic understanding of networking and security
Implement and recommend solutions.
Expertise and knowledge in current and emerging processes, techniques and tools
Build the DevOps practice within ThoughtWorks and drive our thought-leadership externally
Timely identification and resolution of problems.
Design, develop and maintain the CI/CD tools and infrastructure to deliver Horizon Cloud Service
Skills required for a DevOps Engineer
A Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science or relevant field.
3+ years’ experience in the software engineering role.
Expertise in code deployment tools (Puppet, Chef, and Ansible).
Expertise in software development methodologies.
Experience of server, network, and application-status monitoring.
Ability to maintain Java web applications
Strong command on software-automation production systems (Selenium and Jenkins).
Knowledge of Python or Ruby and known DevOps tools like Git and GitHub.
Working knowledge of various databases like SQL (Structured Query Language).
Problem-solving attitude.
It is essential to understand that a DevOps engineer is built out of the growing needs of the business to get a tighter hold of the cloud infrastructure in a hybrid environment. Organizations implementing DevOps skills yield better advantages such as spend relatively less time on configuration management and faster deployment of applications. Demand for people with DevOps skills is growing exponentially because businesses get great outputs from DevOps. Organizations utilizing DevOps practices are overwhelmingly high-functioning: They deploy code up to 30 times more often than their competitors, and 50 percent fewer of their deployments fail, according to 2013-2017 State of DevOps.
Why is remote software development expensive?
While we are speaking to our prospective clients about their product development plans, one comparison that often gets discussed is why they should even outsource to us and not hire an in-house team?While there are many other factors in comparing remote vs in-house software development, one of the important factors in this comparison is the overall cost.Though seasoned entrepreneurs may understand this very well, as a first-time entrepreneur, it’s easy to miss out that when you are hiring a company for your software development, you’re paying for a finished product.
And a “finished product” is a lot more than the code that gets pushed on your servers. Here’s what all goes into building successful software:
Team salaries: The salaries paid to the team working on your product is the most obvious expense and hence this is the first item on this list. Duh!
Office space: A clean, well maintained IT office at an accessible location with all amenities including Internet connectivity, meeting rooms, projectors, whiteboards, pantry, etc. is a constantly recurring cost borne by the company.
Hardware and software licenses: The employee’s laptops and networking equipment, both of which require routine upgrades as per market standards is an important recurring cost an IT company has to bear. In addition, many software licenses and SaaS tools and services (ex. email services, testing servers, OS licenses, etc.) have to be paid for on a month to month basis.
Admin overheads: Admin and maintenance staff and office supplies needed for day to day office operations may seem like small expenses in isolation but quickly start to add up.
CA and Accounts: Any software company will need an accounting and CA services to handle their routine compliances, taxes, and payrolls.
Hiring and training costs: Hiring and training people is a stressful, expensive and time-consuming task. Not only is the hiring process difficult, but every organization also has to deal with the problem of employee churn. Every IT company also needs to spend considerable time in training and upgrading employee skills as per current trends and market expectations.
Team activities: A happy and satisfied team is much more than just offering market-rate salaries. Today’s workforce looks for perks, team activities, etc. and as an employer, these are important team building and retention strategies.
Operating profit: Over and above these costs, the software company will keep a profitability margin which will make the business sustainable over the long run.
If you are starting up, it may be a better idea to simply outsource all of the above to a software company so that you have only one thing to focus all your attention on – Your product
The growth trajectory which brands like Salesforce and Dropbox find themselves operating in year after year is the same that drives thousands of entrepreneurs to make an entry in the SaaS business.
In this event where Newton’s third law comes into play – success of the SaaS companies leading to more entrepreneurs willing to enter the segment – the end result is almost always the same – High Growth of SaaS market.
Software as a Service model – at the back of the plethora of benefits that it offers has reached a stage where the discussions around the benefits that they offer are negligible in front of the queries that surround How to bootstrap a SaaS startup.
We are here to answer the query and its several strings. All through our SaaS startup guide.
Let us take you through the stages that you would have to take to mark your SaaS startup growth strategies.
Stage 1: Create Traction
Once you have gathered the details of individual user demand and have established what you need to offer in your SaaS product, the next step that comes is validating your idea.
Now idea validation would be your one stage where you will not just get the idea checked for its viability but would also get primary level attention from the prospective users.
The steps that you should follow in case of getting early-stage user traction can be somewhere in the lines of –
1. Posting and Promoting Your Idea on ProductHunt
ProductHunt is a haven for entrepreneurs who are at the stage of testing out an idea. The community-like website is home to a number of entrepreneurs and investors who are looking to invest in up-and-coming ideas, along with a number of prospective users.
To get the early stage feedback, you can share your SaaS idea on ProductHunt and mark it open for the community to look into and ask questions about. In fact, seeing the benefits that ProductHunt presence can get to an entrepreneur, it can be a wise move to mark it as one of the best practice to grow early stage Saas startup.
2. Developing and Promoting Your Landing Pages
Your landing page which contains information related to your SaaS offering can be a great way to share your idea with the prospective users along with helping you build an email list.
The idea of a landing page is to have a space where you can show-off your product/service and use the emails collected to share regular updates about your SaaS offering to the users who showed interest in your offering.
3. Becoming Active in Business and Technology Communities
There are a number of communities present on the internet which discusses and dissects new software offerings which are developed and launched with the intent to making processes smoother and answer how to promote SaaS business.
At this stage when you are looking to get the right traction for your business these communities can be a good starting point to pass the message of your arrival along.
Stage 2: Design Prototype
This is the stage which would start with you having an idea of what the users want from your SaaS product. You now know that the problem you identified actually affects masses and the world need answers to them.
And now that you have given the users a theoretical insight into what you are planning to offer, the next step would be to give them something to interact with.
This is the step of designing prototypes.
There are a number of prototyping tools and software that help you design prototypes if you plan on doing the work yourself.
Once you have the whole process of your idea having been converted into a prototype covered, the next step would be its promotion. While you can follow the route of social media and the ones we mentioned in the above mentioned points, a shortcut to get feedback would be to pass along your prototype to the users who showed interest in your SaaS product through eMailers.
You can even gather all the people who showed interest in your idea and do a meetup by making your prototype the center of attraction. It can even be a great place for you to invite investors if getting investment in your prototype is on your agenda.
We will talk about funding later in our SaaS startup guide. For now, let’s move our focus on the development part of it.
Stage 3: Development of a SaaS MVP
Now that you have the SaaS prototype which has been worked around according to the feedback shared by the prospective users, the next stage that you will be entering now is the Minimum Viable Product stage.
The idea of an MVP development is the creation of a working model of your SaaS offering – one that contains all the must-have and unique features that places your product at the top of the competitor’s.
Identification of the features that should be present in the MVP holds a crucial place in the whole development process and then in deciding the future of your business in the domain. Something that is handled by the development agency you will be partnering with to get the idea converted into a working model.
In fact, it is not just the features that have to be paid attention to at this stage but also the tech stack and the development approach that your partnered SaaS app development company would be working around.
When it comes to the right development approach, the one that should be followed in order to take out maximum efficiency off of the whole SaaS development process is Agile development.
The approach comes with a series of attached perks like timely delivery, quick response to changing demand, low cost of development, etc.
Leaving it on your partnered agency to walk you through the many perks of Agile approach of SaaS app development, let us turn our attention on the technology stack that you can rely on to give a great experience to your end-users and the investors alike.
While the focus of the development of a robust SaaS system almost always comes on how strong its backend development ecosystem is, there are other technical frameworks that comes into play as well. Frameworks that are not simply restricted to Firebase.
For a better understanding, let us look at the technology stack choice of some of the top SaaS companies operating in the world.
Once you have devised an MVP on the basis of the right set of technology stack, the next step that comes up in any SaaS startup guide is making the MVP live taking feedback.
Stage 4: Making MVP Live and Working on the Feedback
Right after you have developed your SaaS MVP, the launch stage comes up.
This is the part where you make your SaaS app live for the users to work around and explore. At this stage your partnered agency will come in the picture again. They will work around the final testing of the MVP and making it live on the world wide web.
Once the MVP is made live, your promotion work will take the front seat. At this stage, you will have to look into getting it as many relevant eye-balls as possible.
The first agenda once your SaaS product is launched will be to connect with business reps and entrepreneurs for whom you have developed the software – an effort that would require a sales team. And persuade them to incorporate it in their everyday process.
The second agenda would be to take feedback of their experience. You will have to make note of how they interacted with your offering’s features and what experience they had to share at the back of every individual session.
The success of the second agenda will be deemed fruitful when you ask your agency’s engineers to sit with your test group as they work around the software. This way the speed with which resolutions are attended to will increase by manifold. And your SaaS offering churn rate will also be several points behind what the industry’s statistics show.
Now the end result of this stage would be elements that would come in very handy in the next stage you will be entering now.
Step 5: Getting SaaS Startup Funding
The outcome of stage four, which ended at you validating your MVP’s worth would have brought you at the updation stage – where your partnered SaaS developers worked on the feedback that your real users shared.
Now while updation is happening on the back stage, there are a few things you will have to get into control at the front stage – Funding and Deciding on the SaaS Business Model (latter coming in before the former).
As the engineers work on the technicalities, your team will have to work on the business side of the software – The SaaS pricing strategy, Set of features that would be offered sans any price tag, Markup of the recurrent cost, Scalability feasibility, etc.
The one thing that we would want to put an emphasis on here is the power of offering Freemium. Instead of keeping your product under the paid mode from day one, give users the freedom to enjoy the product before they are asked to spend a penny.
But since no two SaaS companies are same, it can get a little difficult to decide on the SaaS pricing strategy that would work for your business. But no matter how confusing it is, it is of prime importance that you settle on a pricing model for the absence of one can be a reason for your SaaS business failure.
Book a Free Consultation With Our Team of SaaS Consultants to Get Help With the Business Side of it all.
While we handle the business and technical side of your SaaS offering, you will have to move to the next important task at hand – Getting funds for your startup.
Until and unless you have a hefty bank balance (one that entrepreneurs generally don’t have), you will have to focus on getting investors interested and funding in your SaaS product.
The step of finding answers on how to get funding for SaaS startup, crucial as it is, is not easy to achieve. There are a number of equations that you would have to attend to in order to get money on your product. Equations that would mainly depend on how your targeted users responded to the app.
Along with the collection of numbers that your SaaS offering witnessed, you will have to look into the business model that you have set – ensuring it is what keeps you in a profit zone while not being too heavy on the pocket of your users.
Only when you have given the picture of stable profit and a positive user response, the investors will show an interest and give you funding and their experience, readily.
What follows now is the constant process of updation. You will have to constantly keep building on your SaaS software to ensure that the user experience is always kept on a high priority in your SaaS business model.
Well now that we have covered all the stages of setting up your SaaS business, let us give you a peek into the factors that went into defining the success of top SaaS companies across the globe, as the parting note.
With the secret of the top SaaS companies now at your fingertips, it is time for you to get on the path of success chart.
There are a number of benefits that come entailed with the integration of SaaS mobile app development within an enterprise solution, benefits ranging from low cost, easy maintenance, zero space invasion, and the freedom from worrying about system upgrades, amongst others.
While these are the customer/enterprise side benefits, for the SaaS vendors, the benefits are equally attractive – Easy expansion to the foreign market, Service delivery automation, and zero chances of piracy, among a number of others.
All these reasons along with a lot many others have created a huge demand for the SaaS offerings for easing the processes of millions of SMBs around the world.
The demand that comes with a huge revenue generation capability, has grown manifold with the advent of mobile apps.
In this article, we will be giving you insights on how you can start a mobile SaaS business and be an amazing value offerer.
But before we do, it’s time to get back to the basics –
What is SaaS?
Commonly referred to as on-demand software, SaaS can be defined as the software distribution model where a service provider hosts the software for their customers and make it available to them through the internet.
Because of the ease of access that SaaS offers, it has become a popular delivery model for a number of different business applications along with being incorporated in the delivery strategy of the enterprise software vendors – a popularity that has increased the offerings market share to a great extent.
There are a number of different SaaS application ideas which are being offered as part of business applications, such as – sending and receiving email, team collaboration, billing/payroll processing, customer relationship management (CRM), sales management, financial management, human resources management, enterprise resourcing planning (ERP), database management, document management, and content management.
Here are some of the most common uses of SaaS among the many SMBs around the globe –
The use cases of SaaS that we just saw are now slowly making a transition on mobile.
Mobile SaaS applications are what is soon replacing the traditional SaaS model. Businesses – both that are already an established name in the industry and those that are planning to enter the flourishing market, alike are investing heavily in the development or expansion of their SaaS offering on mobile.
This article is for both – Entrepreneurs who are just starting with Mobile SaaS and Businesses who are planning to expand their SaaS offering on mobile.
But before we move on to the guide, let us first look at the Mobile SaaS applications market – the growth tangent it is on and the reason behind that.
The Rise of Mobile SaaS Applications
There are a number of SaaS businesses that are moving on mobile with the hope of increasing their active users and user engagement count along with the benefit of making their business a common name in the corporate world.
Here are some statistics that prove how big the market for Mobile SaaS companies already is and going to be in a few years time:
Mobile SaaS is taking over a number of brands belonging to the small and medium enterprise level, across industries. Factors like increased user base and easier deployment have been driving the businesses who are in the SaaS domain or are willing to enter the space, expand their business plan to mobile apps.
Let us, deep dive, into the benefits that investing in SaaS application development services provides to businesses, instead of looking at it from a superficial level.
Reasons Why Your SaaS Business Need a Mobile App
There are a number of reasons why you should invest in a sound SaaS application development company, here are a few of them –
1.To Make it Accessible
Greater accessibility lies at the core of the mobile app concept. The moment you expand your business website to mobile in form of an app which does not function as an extension of your website but as its complementary addition, you open your business’s avenues to a greater audience who are practically against the idea of switching on their laptop to work the moment they get home.
By presenting your SaaS offering on the mediums that the world is comfortable being available on, you help businesses who then partner with you to be available at all times.
2. To Increase the Active User Count
When you look at the percent of users who are active on your software in typical office hours versus those who are active beyond the fixed office hours, you will see a declining value. Now whether you are a new entrant or a SaaS brand that has been in the market for a long time, a dwindling active user count is never good.
But when you bring your software on mobile, you give the thousands of businesses and their million employees an option to be available on a 24*7 mode – the need of every present-day business – on a device that stays active every waking hour of their day.
3. To Save on the Business Boosting Costs
It is no surprise that mobile apps reduce the cost of marketing, advertising, and keeping a staff just to keep users updated with the service. When you move your business to mobile, you are able to send out notifications and messages in a more real-time as opposed to being active on a website or desktop application, where multiple actions are happening at any given time, making the notification and message ignorance rate high. But the same when sent on mobile increases the engagement rate to a much greater rate. The heightened probability of user engagement that apps get you increases the probability of becoming more profitable.
4.To Have a Competitor Advantage
There are a number of SaaS agencies that have still not expanded to mobile, so the mobile landscape is still very open for the SaaS brands in terms of competition and it is presenting itself as a golden opportunity for businesses that are just starting their Software as a Service business. By becoming available to the users on the device they are most active on, before the other brands, your SaaS business development graph would automatically gain a high user base and an automatic competitor advantage.
Now that it has been established that your SaaS business needs a mobile app, let us now look at the platform you should focus on. If you have an idea of the mobile app ecosystem, you would know that there are three types of app choices that SaaS mobile app developers give you, which your businesses can choose from – Native, Hybrid, and Web.
Native vs Hybrid vs Web: Which Mobile App Should Mobile SaaS Companies choose
While there is no one answer of whether to choose Native, Hybrid, or Web for your mobile app expansion, as they all come with their share of pros and cons, there are factors that can help you decide which option to go for.
Before we get into them, it is apt to look at what differentiates the three mobile app types.
Native Apps: Native applications is deemed to be the best of the lot. The app type is known for its superior quality and better performance, along with giving businesses a direct link to the users’ devices. The idea of Native App is that the mobile application should be downloadable through the Play Store and App Store and give a direct access to the users’ device functionalities like Camera, Microphone, Contact etc.
Hybrid Apps: A mix of both Native and Web app, Hybrid apps appear as Native app but are actually web app that consists of Native UI elements which allow them to interact with the device’s functionalities, something that is missing in the case of Web applications.
Web Apps: It is a mobile application that users can access through the web when they go online. Since it is not a standalone application, it is not available on the stores to download and becomes dependent on the internet connection to function.
With the high-level meaning of all the three mobile app types now attended to, let us look into the factors that differentiate them.
Now that you have seen the contextual difference between the three types of mobile apps, it is time to look into which app type would be best suited for your SaaS mobile app. The answer lies in the functionality you are offering through your mobile app.
If the functionality calls for an online, real-time update with a lot less reliability on the device’s functionalities, go with Web or Hybrid apps. And if the app gives a focus on the superior experience or includes media sharing, go with Native app type.
Now that we have looked into the app type that would be best suited for Mobile SaaS companies, it is time to help you get an answer to a factor that would contribute to the future of your SaaS business – The Pricing Strategy.
What Pricing Strategy Should You Fix For Your Mobile SaaS App
Pricing is a very tricky nut to crack when you are starting your SaaS business. You don’t want to keep it very low to appear as a low-functionality, easy to be slid application and the same time you don’t want to keep it very high so that it becomes out of reach of the thousands of SMBs around the world.
Like the app type choice, there is no fixed answer to this, but what helps is knowing the different pricing strategies that you do have.
Let us look at some of the Mobile SaaS Pricing Strategies that are being followed by most of the SaaS brands.
A.Per User Pricing
One of the most SaaS pricing models, Per User Pricing is where you ask businesses to pay according to the number of users.
B.Per Storage Pricing
Offered by brands like Google and Dropbox, you pay a certain amount for utilizing X amount of storage and the moment space is utilized, you ask businesses to pay to use more space.
C. Feature-Based Pricing
In this case, you charge businesses on the basis of features that you are offering and they require. Here you set an advanced level of every feature and ask businesses to pay more depending on their growing requirement.
D. Freemium
Under this mobile SaaS pricing model, you offer the best features of your software to the businesses for free and then ask them to upgrade if they wish to avail the add-on services.
So here was your list of pricing strategy that you can find the majority of your Mobile SaaS apps following and now it depends entirely on your business model that which pricing strategy you think would best align with.
Now that we have looked at the things or factors that should be considered when building a mobile SaaS app, it is time to look into the factors that should be avoided at all costs. Because ultimately, the number of desktop SaaS users are a lot more than mobile users. And the reason behind this difference is the mistakes that SaaS businesses make when going mobile.
Here’s what those mistakes are:
Mistakes To Avoid When Starting a Mobile SaaS Business
While it is understandable that the complex functions a user can achieve through desktop or laptop are difficult to achieve through a mobile screen, it is nevertheless important to understand the actions your SaaS users would perform outside the office and ensure that your mobile SaaS is prepared for them.
When you make a Mobile SaaS with this aim, your app automatically comes one step closer to becoming a hit. Here are the mistakes that you should avoid in order to ensure that your business is offering the best solution to mobile users.
1. Thinking Responsive Websites are Enough for going “Mobile”
There are many SaaS-based companies who believe that offering responsive websites to the users solve the purpose of going Mobile and is enough to support the demand of the on the go businesses. But is it enough? No. When you develop a mobile app, you give users a mobile-centric experience that has been designed around their device and operating system. It offers them accessibility and speed that is impossible to be achieved through responsive websites.
2. Making a Mobile SaaS app just for the sake of it
There are a number of businesses who have a strong desktop user base and taking their mobile counterpart not so seriously, they don’t invest in the proper development of the mobile SaaS app. What they fail to understand that with a failed, unplanned mobile app they are putting their desktop SaaS product image at risk as well. The need of the hour for SaaS businesses starting with or expanding in the mobile ecosystem is to not deliver a low performing, buggy app but getting it developed from experience SaaS application development company, that understands the difference between the web and mobile experience and have a clear understanding of which events should a mobile app attend and which should be restricted to the desktop version.
3. Personalize the Experience According to Mobility based Use Case
There are a number of functions that a user can perform on a desktop SaaS but the mobility needs would be very restricted and ones requiring a quick in and out time. So you will have to identify the tasks first and then plan a mobile app around it instead of putting all the desktop features inside the limited space mobile app. With this, we have looked at the factors to be considered when starting a mobile SaaS business and the ones that should be avoided. Next, we will look at the challenges that you will have to overcome in order to become a valuable Mobile SaaS business entity of the industry.
Challenges Associated with Mobile SaaS
There are a number of challenges related to Mobile SaaS integration that are keeping businesses away from exploring them to the core. While some are at a more organizational level like making the employees use a mobile app in addition to the core desktop version, there are some at the functional level as well.
1. Data Related
SaaS Integration, whether on desktop or mobile has to deal with a great amount of data coming in from millions of users. In a scenario like this, it is important that you have proper data control, management, and security infrastructure in place. While developing a SaaS Mobile app we ensure that the ecosystem we are using and the cloud integration we are applying is hackproof. We also maintain a strong backup in case the data is taking time to be fetched so that there is zero time lag for hackers to enter the system.
2. Testing Related
One of the biggest challenge associated with Mobile SaaS apps is testing the apps. Here are some of the testing specific challenges that you may encounter –
Quick validation round for constant updates
Inability to authenticate the interface specific component in the backend
Difficulty in verifying security because of multiple data format
Mobile app not following any standards
Complexities at time of data transfer confirmation between a business and SaaS mobile app
We use automation tools for testing our SaaS application to avoid the issues associated with constant updates.
We segregate problem areas by categorizing them according to severity.
We apply hack-proof encryption algos for unbreakable security.
We develop standardized test cases and then validate them on basis of priority.
We thoroughly check the transfer of the data between the network, companies, and SaaS apps.
With this, we have now come to a point in the article where you are contextually prepared to start your SaaS business on mobile. The last thing that is left for you to know is the SaaS app development cost.
How Much Would It Cost You To Develop a SaaS System
If you break down the Mobile SaaS applications cost, you will get Five elements:
Coding and Development
Integration of Other Systems in the App
Building Tests
Alpha and Beta Testing
Marketing and Release
Noting the work that would go into the development of your SaaS system, the cost that you should be ready to pay would be somewhere in the range of $50k to $250k.
With this, you have read it all – The Mobile SaaS Market, the Benefit of taking the Mobile route, the Factors to consider and avoid, and the Cost of Mobile SaaS development. The only step left for you to take now is to get in touch with our mobile app development team and start your Mobile SaaS journey and make yours a SaaS based mobile app example.
