Learn how to – 5 Essential Considerations When Scaling Your SaaS.

Developing a SaaS product offers many benefits. This type of start-up offers the potential for recurring income for developers while appealing to a broad B2B audience. The real challenges occur when it’s time to scale the product to meet demand.

Here are some essential considerations when scaling your SaaS and what to know before you take the leap.

Assessing Current Scalability

Ideally, development teams should build all software products with scalability in mind. Unfortunately, many small start-up teams with limited resources put scalability on the backburner as they focus on creating their MVP.

According to a software development company rinf.tech, “scalability is your ability to effectively increase or decrease resources to meet the current and future demands.” Before determining whether it’s time to scale, you must first decide whether you can or what you need to make it work. Do you need more team members? More computing power? Address these issues before casting a wider net when seeking customers for your SaaS product.

Streamlining Onboarding

When scaling your product, it’s also important to revisit your onboarding flow. Onboarding can be a huge friction point for customers, negatively influencing their experience. When scaling a product, preparing for proactive customer service is essential. In other words, how will you solve problems before your customers before they exist?

Take some time to develop an automated, streamlined onboarding flow, using other communication methods as needed. For example, you might have an in-app onboarding tutorial, a video training library, an email marketing sequence, or a combination. 

Bring in a few beta testers to review your onboarding process and highlight pain points. The easier it is for your customers to learn how to use your software, the more successful your scaling efforts will become.

Existing Manual Processes

Manual processes are a killer for scaling a digital product offering. If your core software functionality relies on one or more humans keeping the workflow going, you don’t have a scalable SaaS product. 

It’s also important to consider your product as a greater part of your marketing ecosystem. For example, do you have automation to trigger new customer email flows, or is this still a manual process? Running a few manual processes with a small team is fine when you have one or two customers, but what about when you have hundreds or thousands?

Assessing existing manual processes and finding automated solutions is a top priority when scaling your SaaS product.

Evaluating the Unexpected Costs

Updated cost modeling also gets overlooked when scaling an app or digital product. Some costs are apparent and easy to plan for, like adding new team members or investing in products to assist with automation. Other variable costs can be surprising. If you use a cloud platform like AWS, you may get hit with a load balancing bill spike as demand increases.

Taking a step back and evaluating all potential costs and how they’ll impact your margins and profitability as you scale is essential for long-term success.

Getting Team Buy-In

One of the hidden impacts of scaling a product— especially if there’s dysfunction in the process— is demoralizing the team. If the process isn’t handled well, you may lose key team members who become frustrated by the changes. Change is difficult in any operation— getting team buy-in is essential.

Have an open discussion with the team about the intention and goals behind scaling and what that process will look like. Empower team members to share their concerns and expertise when creating a scaling plan. Leadership should model the change they wish to see and be willing to dive in and get some work done to assist the process.

Scaling a SaaS product is a challenge. When handled correctly, however, it can be gratifying and transform a small start-up into an established industry leader. Consider the factors listed above when determining the best path forward.