Three Mobile Strategies for SaaS
Thinking about branching your SaaS offering into the world of mobile apps? Here are three different strategies, with individual pitfalls and benefits on how to tackle SaaS on mobile:
1. Mobile-only / Mobile-first
Summary:
The mobile-only/first strategy puts the mobile app at the centre of your SaaS business. It’s the only interface to and for your customers. All functionalities of your SaaS offering are available via the mobile app — and via the mobile app only. As a result, your product will depend on the App Store / Google Play Store and the surrounding ecosystem. That can be a good thing, but also very limiting.
However, in truth, there are very few successful mobile-only SaaS companies. There are some exceptions, but enterprise software usually needs to satisfy complex business processes. That simply isn’t possible on a small screen for most products. Another limiting factor is that while nearly every company supplies its employees with laptops, this is less likely for mobile phones.
Famous Examples:
- Grasshopper Connect (a true mobile-only experience)
- Square, SumUp, iZettle
Minimum Requirements:
- On-boarding funnel to acquire new customers.
- A freemium strategy incl. trial accounts for paid subscriptions.
- In-App Purchases (multiple tiers with options for special offers) or alternatively a purchase flow that circumvents Apple’s / Google’s ecosystem (similar to what Spotify and Audible are doing these days).
- Customer support interface via in-app live chat, a messenger and/or phone.
- Real-estate within your app to advertise to customers about issues, special offers or new features.
Business Model:
- Subscriptions/In-App Purchases: Consumers acquire a day-pass, weekly, monthly or yearly subscription via Google Play or the App Store. Apple or Google will take a 30% platform share of the gross revenue and deduct taxes.
- In-App Advertisement: Admittedly, I have never seen a SaaS offering fuelled by in-app advertisement. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. If you have an example, let me know in the comments!
- “Free”: A business model based entirely on free licenses (not freemium). This is unlikely to work for most, but if your name is Facebook, Google or Microsoft you can use a free mobile app to lock customers into your ecosystem if only to gobble up market share from competitors with less cash at their hands. The MS Teams app is a great example of that.
- “Hybrid”: A mix of the three above.
Cons:
- With a mobile-only SaaS product, you are unlikely to attract the mid-size market and definitely no enterprise customers. Your audiences are the solopreneurs and SMBs.
- Customers may request a web/desktop version after some time. If your business is built for mobile-first, this may cause serious challenges to your engineering organization and your balance sheet.
- Pricing needs to follow Apple and Google guidelines. These are wide-ranged but offer no processes for face-to-face negotiations. Essentially, you are locked down in a world that was designed for mass-consumer pricing.
- The Total Addressable Market (TAM) is reduced to the mobile ecosystem. Mobile is huge. But Mobile + Web + Desktop / Laptop is bigger. Many SaaS businesses are operating in industries that have to follow strict regulations and do not allow mobile-only solutions — if they allow mobile at all.
- Marketing will have to focus on the Point-of-Sale of your business and that is the mobile phone/tablet itself. The mobile marketing system has become fierce and you will be competing with all sorts of applications like games, ride-sharing, health, news, food delivery, instant messaging and social.
Pros:
- If your app is targeting young businesses or solo-entrepreneurs who don’t need much other than their phone or tablet, then this is your space. If this is your world, then enjoy the luxury and blessing of working on mobile-only.
- There are some markets (India and SEA in particular) where it is more likely that your customers have a smartphone than a laptop.
- Utilising the marketing opportunities of the App Store / Google Play eco-system can lead to a lot of downloads for very little investment. But that is entirely up to Apple / Google and even though it can be facilitated, there is no guarantee.
- Marketing and tracking the success of your efforts is much easier if you operate within a limited ecosystem such as on mobile. If you set up your tracking right, you will know everything you need to know and possibly more than necessary.
2. The Lightweight Companion App
Summary:
A lightweight companion app adds additional controls and/or functionality, which supports or enhances the primary desktop or web experience of your SaaS product. Alternatively, it can also be a very basic version of the parent software.
Famous Examples:
- Microsoft Office Mobile (a lightweight version of MS Office in one app)
Minimum Requirements:
- Lightweight version of the parent application.
- Alternatively: Ability to control some parts of the parent application i.e. scheduling or remotely starting work processes.
Business Model:
Companion apps may be offered as a value-adding service justifying a new price tier of the overall SaaS offering. In most cases, however, they are a free addition to the primary product platform. Hence, there is no business model for lightweight companion apps.
Cons:
- You are essentially building a mobile app that is not essential but somehow nice-to-have for the rest of your SaaS product. To make it meaningful you will need to invest development resources, a marketing budget or real-estate on your primary product to cross-link to your mobile app. You should ask yourself:
- Can I reach a critical mass of users with this app?
- Does it add enough value to justify long-standing maintenance costs?
- Can I integrate the functionality of the companion app somehow into my primary product on desktop or the web rather than building a new app for it?
- If the answers are: Yes, Yes, No…then ok…maybe it is worth it. If not, then rather focus on building a fully-fledged mobile app than a lightweight version of it — or don’t do it at all.
Pros:
- It can be a cheap option to extend the functionality of your product, without having to dig deep into tech debt (if you have any).
3. Mobile as part of the Family
Summary:
You have a web and a desktop app, obviously, you also need to have a mobile app that does the same thing, but for customers who are on the go. The mobile-extension is another platform in your overall product offering. It requires additional development and marketing resources and it should be treated as equal to the other platforms you support.
There are many great examples of mobile-extensions: GoToMeeting, Slack, Basecamp, Workday, DocuSign, Invoice2Go, … the list is endless. This is the standard mobile-SaaS strategy.
Famous Examples:
This is the standard mobile-SaaS strategy, so the list is endless really:
- GoToMeeting
- Slack
- Basecamp
- Workday
- DocuSign
- Invoice2Go
- …
Minimum Requirements:
- Mirroring the full functionality (or at least a very large portion of it).
- Also, add mobile-only use case functionalities that make life easier for commuters, travellers, low-bandwidth scenarios.
Business Model:
The mobile-extension is part of your standard business model. You can use it to either a) offer it as a value-adding bonus for free, b) a good reason to increase the price or c) a mobile-only version at a lower price point.
Cons:
- Each platform costs additional marketing and development resources. Nothing to be done about this. But if your SaaS product has no really good mobile use case, then maybe this is not worth the effort. Having no mobile app is better than having one with a really bad user experience.
Pros:
- Usually, you cannot afford to not have a mobile app. Make a point about it, by building features and functions that are mobile-specific. That way, you don’t treat it as “yet another platform to support”.
