How do we start our SaaS `Step by Step` - Part 1: (Business strategy & first income)


We do build an SaaS-Service, which is - some kind -  of mixup of shopify and wix.

We do have developed our own online Shop Software, because we didn't found any Shopsoftware which fit our needs in performance and modularity. 


12 Rules as Business-Strategy

First we build up simple `must-have` rules as guidelines for our product, development and further decisions:


For Customers / Users:

  1. Mobile is King (Mobile first & offline first)
  2. Incredible high performance 
  3. KISS (Keep it simple [and] straightforward)
  4. FAMAU (Forget about maintenance and upgrading) [We do it for you]

For us:

  1. Only add Features, Users do really need / want (Keep in contact with our customers)
  2. Use of a future-proof tech stack
  3. Lowest possible resource consumption (Hardware & diskspace usage)
  4. Modular construction to easily expand, test and maintain all parts of the service

For Agencies & Developers

  1. API-Based Services to be able to automate and fully integrate in their own business processes
  2. Ability to use White-labeling and Multi-Customer (for our Dashboard)
  3. FAMAU (Forget about maintenance and upgrading) [We do it for you]
  4. YGWYPF (YouGetWhatYouPayFor) No long-term contracts for single online shops or Productpages for Agencies


MVP* and first Customers

*MVP means `minimally viable product`, and means you test your early-stage version of a product or concept with first customers.

So we did it for both - our product Webpages and online shops. Our first generated Product-Webpage (which in fact is used as Company Website ;) ) is https://easy-car-service.de.

We got valuable feedback but also much praise from the customer.This strengthened our conviction that we are on the right track.

 

First satisfied customer - we where so proud and happy!


The customer also ordered 3 other Product-Webpages and plan to order additional ones in the future. 

 

🏆 We've reached 40€ MRR 🎉 

 

And as our Service is such `lightweight` designed (from Ressource-consumption-perspective), it's completely cover our running costs and give us our first income from this service :)


But that's not all, we also start MVP for our online Shop. 

Lucky us, we where able to bill our first online shop on a project base, because the customer want to connect his existing ERP-Software (OrgaMax) with the online shop.

We thought: "Hey, we do have a fully modular, API based online Shop, so it will be no problem to archive this ERP-Software connection..." so we did this integration successfully.

Additional benefit of this customer request: We implemented an ERP-Connecter in early state, even though we had planed this feature for later on... and we are further optimizing our API interface in order to be able to integrate other ERP software even more easily.  WIN/WIN

We got valuable Feedback from the Customer and add some nice Features to our shop software, we didn't noticed before. 

So it was worth full in two way's for us: First we got additional income (round about 5K €) and we got additional Customer who give us insights in their needs.


That's it for today!

If you want to stay up to date with what else we have done, are doing and have planned for the future, don't miss the next article. 


I will talk about how we start searching and (probably found... future will show it) promising cooperation partners, don't miss my next article.


What you can do? 

Follow me, share this article, talk about our project, give a comment and suggestions.


Thanks for reading!

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