Intro
The following article discusses how to build a scalable SAAS Product by providing a real life example that portraits the evolution of an idea into a MVP “Minimal Viable Product“, then shows how this MVP should transition to support the need of a bigger market.
SAAS is the abbreviation of “Software as a Service”. A manufacturer creates a version of a software and places it on the cloud making it accessible for clients. These clients do not need to purchase the software itself, they simply need to create an account and use the services that the software offers.
In case you are not familiar with the word SAAS Product and you want to know more about it means and its advantages, simply follow this link. Once you are ready to move forward, continue reading the discussion to learn how to build a scalable SAAS product from the ground up.
The Idea
To better explain how to build a scalable SAAS, let’s use an example. Consider we have the following use case where a group of people decide to build a Marketplace that enables merchants from different industries to promote their goods and offer them to online shoppers. The marketplace consolidates all the goods from all the merchants under a single catalog. Shoppers browse this catalog, fill their carts and make the orders.
Before jump any further, let’s pause for a moment and think about the audience.
- Online shoppers are looking for products to purchase. They want to access an e-commerce platform using their phones, laptops, tablets … etc. Shoppers will browse and filter the products till they find what they are looking for. When they do, they will simply buy. Shoppers don’t care who is offering the product or where the product is being shipped from. They don’t even care how the transaction is being processed. All they want is to buy the product and have it delivered.
- Merchants on the other hand, want to make money. They are looking for a way to promote their products and they want to process as many orders they can get. The platform they seek must help them manage their inventory and perhaps sync their existing systems quickly thus avoid long hours of data entry. They don’t care how the product is shipped to the shopper as long as it gets delivered. They don’t even care if the shopper uses his phone or his laptop as long as he buys what they offer.
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The Plan
We notice that the audience is split in 2. Each category has its different objectives and KPIs. The platform also has many integration points like the delivery and payments systems. The platform should also support allowing merchants to quickly sync and start selling.
This is not an easy product to build. There are many variables that should be considered and building the whole platform should cost a small fortune. So before we gather the troops and start on this quest, we have to consider the budget. We don’t want to invest a lot of money in the development then come to the conclusion that “Hey! it will take time for this product to become profitable!”.
Our best strategy is to kick off with an MVP. The MVP must contain the basic feature, offers the basic functionality and be accessible via the right channels. First, we target a small portion of the market, collect feedback, analyze what to improve then iterate. So, let’s see how to build this MVP.
The MVP
Our Marketplace provides shoppers the ability to browse products added by merchants. Some merchants offer the same products. Some products have different variations like color, size, specs .. etc.
In some cases the product will have different pricing depending on the variations. In other cases, the product availability might be limited depending on the merchant’s stock. The marketplace is responsible of handling all these details and takes care of displaying the information to the shoppers. All what the shoppers need to do is browse through the catalog, select a product and choose if they want it to have it shipped or pick it up from a near by point of sale.
According to a survey conducted by CLOUDWAYS, the top 3 Open source E-commerce platforms to build online stores in 2019 are WooCommerce, Magento and Drupal (read more). So we will pick one of these frameworks, and use it to build our MVP. Once our MVP is ready, we deploy it on a shared hosting or maybe a private VPS. Then we will tackle a small portion of the market and invite some clients to try it out.
This solution might sustain between 50,000 and perhaps up to 100,000 users. This might not be a big number at the moment but we are not focusing on handling traffic at this stage. At this point, our main focus is collecting feedback. Feedback in this case, comes in different formats. We are investigating the experience of our merchants, and we are also investigating the experience of our online shoppers.
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Conclusion
Once we get to the conclusion that our audience is pleased with the output of our MVP we can then move forward to phase 2.
Phase 2
Assuming that the research we did in earlier stages identified a big potential market. This market offers a client base that includes around 900,000 online shoppers and 9000 merchants that can be on-boarded into our marketplace.
Since our MVP cannot sustain this number, we need to scale. This upgrade does not necessarily mean that we should improve the hosting platform that is running our application.
Building a scalable SAAS that can serve 100 customers or 10000 customers is the same. In this case, why not put a solution that permits serving the market size we are aiming at and while we are at it, why not provision for an even bigger markets at later stages.
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