How to start developing a SaaS product?

Full disclosure, I'm developing Nodewood, so I have my biases.

Before you start developing, make sure you have something people will want to spend money on. An easy test of this is - do you have any competitors? If not, you're either insanely early to this space (unlikely) or it's not a profitable market (more likely). If you do have competitors, great! Research them as much as you can - find out the choices they've made, the customers they target, as much as you can. Then decide how you're going to differentiate yourself both from them and from the alternative of "not using a product in your space at all". For example, for people considering Freshbooks or Quickbooks, one alternative is just sending invoices made from Microsoft Word through email.

Once you're certain you have a good product and product identity, start marketing. Put up a landing page. Join communities your target market are in. Make yourself helpful and known. Start writing - consider Priceonomics' strategy on content marketing: take the data you have from your research and write about the interesting parts of it. Set up a mailing list and collect email addresses from people interested in your product. Keep that list warm - let them know about major developments and send them a "warning" email just before you launch so they've had time to consider if they're going to buy (though this is getting ahead of ourselves).

As for actual development, this is where my biases show most strongly. Don't write code you don't need to. You can go super hard in this direction and try a #nocode solution, but for a lot of apps, you'll just need to write code to provide the unique business value you're looking to offer. In this case, I recommend using a SaaS starter kit that will handle all the common boilerplate for you (UI, user auth/management, subscriptions, etc). Nodewood is my entry in that space, but I'm still developing it, so if you're looking to start development ASAP, there are definitely great alternatives in things like Laravel Spark and SaaS Pegasus (also if you prefer to work in PHP/Laravel and Python/Django, respectively).

This is a long comment, but only a short list of suggestions for what is a very large topic. If you have more-specific questions, feel free to ask me or anyone else here!

Build a software is quite easy when compared to running a SaaS business.

Hence keep your software development activity at last. Work on following things first

1. Customer interview

2. Find out how you can reach your potential customers

3. Understand customer and their workflow in and out

4. Understand your compitator

5. Understand and get in touch with the other influencers of your customer

6. Build prototype and validate your Idea with real potential customers

7. Find out the pricing and acceptable range.

8. Discover your long lasting product differentation and positioning.

Start by creating a front-page, focus on design, show all the cool features you have in mind, do not build the product yet. On the front-page include a Sign up for beta form, so you get a list of users and a measure of the interest on the product. Do some marketing of the idea. Wait until the list grows! Get feedback from some of the users on the list, only then decide if you should build the product and what the MVP features should be.

I'm assuming that you have validated your product. Try to do some presales before writing the code. You can later refund them if you aren't starting or idea is flawed. Try to do an MVP (don't take more than 2 weeks). Launch it to your initial set of customers and get feedback. There are several tools to build an MVP. Don't think about scale while building an MVP. Hope this would have helped u :)

Have you spoke to any potential customers?

Is there demand for the product?

I'd start with just a landing page and ad budget first to test the concept, and do some sales along side this before investing a lot of money and time in development. Once you have validated that you can generate some sales, then move to product dev :-)

Hi @Naveenraju: I'm a big believer in Lean Startup. I'd test the idea before you write a line of code by doing things like buying $100 of google ads to see if people click on whatever SaaS idea you are thinking of making or even create a marketing website for the idea to see if it draws attention. I also saw this book called The Mom Test (http://momtestbook.com) which talks about how most friends will tell you "your idea is awesome!" just to be polite but in reality you need to find unbiased feedback. Good luck!

There's very sound advice in the comments section here so I won't go deep into that.

just wanted to say simplefunnel.io can help you with the payments without much hassle.
we will support recurring payments by the time you launch so that should help.

My only piece of advice would be, don't listen to anyone who says if it's gonna work or not.

Just throw a landing page together with your product and see how people respond. Once you have good response THEN start building the product.

What is holding you back from building the product right now? Technical decision making? Sometimes the best way to start is to just pick the stack you’re most familiar with and start.