Things you can do to speed up your SaaS development
We all see problems and trends in the market, and developing a SaaS product on top of these problems or trends at the right time before anyone else could turn out to form a successful SaaS business.
Sometimes it all matters about the right time, for example when the AI trend came a lot of SaaS in the early started to introduce AI as a feature, which gave them more attention concerning other products. But now every SaaS getting launched has some kind of AI, which has become common until it’s not a total game chaining.
Thus let’s see how can we speed up the development time of our SaaS to get into the market at the right time. We’ll be looking into already-build libraries or SDKs that we can use, some features you don’t need to have in MVP that we can skip, and things that we can manually do.
But before we start, I have written a book on marketing if you want to take a deep dive into marketing and know how to get long-term paying customers for your SaaS, “Marketing Strategies to Grow Your SaaS” which will cover all the necessary steps and strategies in depth to help you take your SaaS from scratch and get some real paying users.
Save time in coding 🧑💻
There are a lot of libraries and tools that are available in the market that give you some boilerplate to already start with so you don’t have to waste time in developing the most common things like Authorization/Authentication, Database, Payments/Subscriptions, and Admin Panel.
Some of the most famous tools out there are,
- Shipfast: Next JS + Tailwind CSS + MongoDB + Mailgun + Stripe
- Open SaaS: React JS + Node JS + Open AI + Stripe + Tailwind CSS
- Next Starter AI: Next JS + Supabase + Stripe + Open AI + Tailwind CSS
Using such an already setup boilerplate helps you a lot in saving time with coding and you can focus on building the core USP of your SaaS application. Feel free to use some other tools too also that you know, and have used in the past or by your friends.
Also if your SaaS deals with any kind of integration like integrating Salesforce, Zoho, Shopify, or anything else we can use tools like IntegrationOS or Paragon, that will handle the backend of the integration and will offer your APIs directly to use in your SaaS.
Also if you don’t want to go with any kind of backend boilerplate you can only go with frontend development and code backed by your own, for frontend, you can refer to the MUI store for the best React JS/Next JS templates which are easy to set up and have things like auth guard, sessions, all necessary UI components build out for you.
If you also want to use a No Code/Low Code approach you can try using Strapi which is a Node JS headless CMS where you can create all the necessary CRUD operations for your SaaS and integrate with your database.
Using Manage Services 🖥️
Now let’s talk about hosting and deployment while developing a SaaS product in starters I like to keep things simple and fast, and I want to deliver my thing to the market as quickly as possible. Thus I go with managed services like Heroku, Vercel, Netlify, Render, App Services on Azure, Mongodb.com, Cloudflare, or Cloud Run on GCP.
These services are mostly PaaS and are easy to set up with your code base for faster deployments.
Later on, once the SaaS grows, you can focus more on having individual VMs or your own VPC running for the same work. But for starting I don’t need to hire a separate DevOps engineer or a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure for me.
One thing to remember with these services, I know they are easy to use and provide good UI to interact with rather than coding, but if you don’t use them carefully you might end up overusing them which can cost you much.
Features you don’t need to code 🙅♂️
If you are developing an MVP of your SaaS and you are in the early stage, you can skip some of the features and handle things manually from your end.
You can skip the entire Payment/Subscription flow and for starting you can have a Google Sheet maintained with the records of the user subscription and manually send them the invoice link from Stripe.
You can also include humans to work in the backend rather than coding the backend. For example, if my SaaS is generating leads from LinkedIn then I can hire people from Fiverr or Upwork or even have Interns to manually go there and scrap data for me.
You can create an interface where users will see their requests are in process and then you can perform those actions manually and give them the results to download.
This is not a long-term solution but good enough to test your MVP in the market and see its demands.
Use 3rd party APIs 🔗
You can develop your entire SaaS USP on someone's else SaaS by simply using the APIs from them. This is again not a long-term solution until you have your backend and infrastructure ready but a good starting point.
There are also risks with this approach, don’t become too dependent on someone else APIs as the moment they close or increase the pricing of there you are also affected. Thus you should have your solution as soon as you generate some income.
These were some of the tips and tricks good saving time in your SaaS development, but I would suggest in the future as your SaaS grows you should move towards having your feature coded and not use any APIs for the USP of your SaaS and have a stable yet scalable infrastructure design for your SaaS.
Let me know if you have any questions in the comments I would love to answer them for you.
Also, if you want to take a deep dive into running a successful AI-based SaaS business and want to know all the key strategies and points, I’ve written a book “Cheat Code for Building AI-Driven SaaS”. This book will provide you with extensive guidance and you will find your path for building your AI-based SaaS.
