SaaS Product Development

A SaaS Development Team should advise on 7 technical aspects

As an entrepreneur or product owner, you have been building or helping growing businesses for a while. You know what it takes to accomplish business success. And you have a great idea that is waiting to be turned into a successful digital business. The thing is, you don’t know how to do it. The lack of technical knowledge blocking you from proceeding further or moving faster. The fear of making a mistake that will influence your product’s quality in the long-run blocks you from acting.

We know how it feels. We have been working with technology start-ups and scale-ups for more than 16 years. Far not all of them have had technology knowledge to perceive great ideas on their own. That’s why they came to us. With our knowledge, experience and hands-on specialists (dedicated development teams), they have reached their goals. And so will you!

7 main technical aspects of SaaS product development

SaaS product development is a complicated process. Besides a great idea, hard work, practical approach, visionary thinking, and excellent organisation, developing a great SaaS product requires technical preparation and execution. These are the seven most important technical aspects to take into account before SaaS development.

A development team advises on technical aspects of SaaS product development

To make your SaaS product stable and future-proof, you need to decide on these technical features before the actual development. Without proper technical knowledge and extensive SaaS software development experience, it’s hard or even impossible to choose on your own. That’s why you should choose a SaaS experienced development team to help you make the right decisions and develop a successful product.

Technology stack choice

Selecting the technology stack for software or application development might be quite challenging nowadays due to rapidly emerging technologies. Nevertheless, the choice of technology is a key decision that will affect the whole development process in the long run. There is no “one size fits all” solution for technology stack choice for SaaS. The choice is heavily dependent on product requirements and features. At first glance, the safest decision would be to select a technology stack that your team is most familiar with. However, it’s far not always the best choice. It is essential to identify if that stack will be suitable for implementing all the planned features.

Once you decide on the technology stack, another critical aspect will be to ensure that the Cloud Provider supports these technologies so your team will not struggle with deployment and scalability.

Database

Choosing a database engine is another crucial element in SaaS development planning. Similarly to technology stack choice, a wide range of available database engines will not simplify this task. Whatever technology choice you make, it’s crucial that the chosen database design meets your business requirements and follows the best practices like data normalisation, data integrity, correct naming conventions, good documentation, etc. Another significant aspect related to database choice is backup. It may sound quite obvious; however, it’s often not prioritised during rapid development and might easily be neglected.

Third-party services integration

During the development process, your team might come up with an idea to use external services to perform one or another task. It can be a wise solution to use a third-party service instead of developing the complete functionality from scratch. Payment providers, customer service solutions, and chat service providers are a few examples of third-party services often used for SaaS. However, you should consider some aspects of recommended solutions before deciding on service integration. First and foremost, you need to estimate how much such integration will cost you in the long run. Keep in mind that your product will become more and more popular with time so that the service price might grow accordingly. Secondly, before you decide on integration, contact the service’s sales team to ensure that their product is scalable and meet your growth plan. Last but not least is to research the stability and popularity of the third-party product, the quality of the documentation and the reliability of its support team.

Scalability, queueing system

One of the most important aspects of SaaS development is scalability. In other words, if your product is able to handle 1000 as well as 100 thousands of users simultaneously.

In essence, scalability should be taken into account from the very beginning of the development process. The infrastructure should be stateless. It means you cannot store data or files on the same server that serves the API services. For these reasons, it’s recommended to use third-party services like AWS S3 or AWS RDS. The most complex features that can be executed asynchronously should be moved to the queue system where they can be performed without burdening the main servers.

Security audit

A security audit is a frequently forgotten part of the SaaS development process. It mostly happens when rising startups are trying to release the first public version as soon as possible. Before you publish your product, ensure that all data stored in the system is well protected and compliant with the best security practices. Regular penetration testing is another great practice to adapt. You can plan it for a few times a year or after significant updates in the software. The penetration test practice will help ensure that your product is free of security vulnerabilities and compliant with standards like HIPAA, GDPR, etc.

Deployments

While the product is in the development phase, deployment is a piece of cake. But when the product is already up and running, problems start to appear. Finding the right time for deploying changes that require downtime is hard, especially when your business operates worldwide. As software and database structure changes are inevitable parts of development during the whole product life cycle, you need to find the deployment process solution. You can decide to implement an automated deployment process. The more automated the deployment process is, the less hassle the whole process will be. There are plenty of solutions that will help to deliver the changes in the most seamless way. A few examples of such solutions are:

Logging errors

Errors are an inherent part of the software lifecycle. No matter how complex your application, errors will always appear during the runtime or deployment. Therefore it is essential to have logging tools to track all the errors and warnings properly. Sentry, DataDog, LogRocket, and other similar logging tools are the robust solutions you can easily adapt with your software. In most cases, implementing one of these tools is a better choice than implementing your own monitoring tool. They provide more detailed error messages and stack traces. It makes it easier and faster for developers to find and fix the problem. The speed of solving the problem might be essential when the issues found in a production environment, and the time and quality of your reaction to the reported errors will affect your reputation.

Start your SaaS Product Development

With the necessary knowledge in place, you are ready to take the next step — collecting the MVP requirements and gathering your development team. Amsterdam Standard is happy to help you with technical aspects advice or assembling a development team dedicated to your project.

You are just a few clicks away from building your development team.

• Send us an email or fill out the contact form.
• We will schedule a discovery call with you to figure out your goals and requirements.
• Based on this information, we create a proposal for the team for your project.
• As soon as the proposal is agreed upon, we provide you with a SaaS development team.

Don’t miss your chance to create a successful SaaS product. With your great idea and market knowledge and our tech expertise, tools, processes and specialists, you can reach your ambitious goals. Together, we form a powerful alliance. In this case, one plus one equals three. Leave your fears behind, hire a team, and reach your goals!

Originally published at https://amsterdamstandard.com.