Building the minimum viable SaaS team
Starting a business is somewhat like making a movie. You get the right people on board, and make something cool that people love.
I started out building a lean team for my SaaS company back in 2007 and over the years have learnt a lot from our successes and failures, who to hire and for what role. Today, I see a lot of SaaS companies start out (reminds me the days of when every other company was either a web design studio or a SEO agency) and hence would like to pen my thoughts on the minimum viable SaaS team you should build while starting out. Maybe, just maybe, this information might be useful to you, Mr. Entrepreneur.
At the bare minimum, you need to fill out the following spots - it doesn't matter if someone does multiple things (hey, we are all wearing multiple hats here) but this is really the bare minimum you need to get started and get going...
design/UI/UX
A clean website and web application design is key. This is more important than the number of features you are going to have. In fact, we have noticed no co-relation between increase in number of features and revenue. What matters is a smooth experience users get when they use your product. Frequent A/B testing on website design and content will help improve your conversions.
web content/ analytics
The beauty of a web business is that everything is measurable. Have someone measure your key business indicators on a weekly basis. What is measured can be improved. Otherwise you will be flying blind. Some of the key things we measure on a weekly and monthly basis are website visitors, % converted to trial plans, % converted to paid customers, churn rate, renewal rate, lifetime value of a customer on all our plans, lifetime value of a customer on all our plans, customer breakdown by industry, website bounce rate, how are users finding us, top referring sites with best conversions.
We started measuring these things a little later in the day as we were blinded by fighting the feature war. But, it is just pure bliss when your analytics talk to you and you kind of know where to go next.
developers/architects
Smart, humble and energetic developers that share your company vision is important early on. In India, most developers are from the service background which makes most of them a lousy fit for a product company. These guys need to be self-learners with excellent problem solving skills. Early on, developers can do some database and network administration. Expand this team as your scale increases. Having a few developers is better than having a lot of them.
support/ customer service/ QA
Every product goes through teething issues and so will yours. Make sure someone in your team can tackle these issues and liaison with the development team. Every customer query will help you strengthen your website help faqs and will also give you content for your blog. If this person can double-up as a tester (programmers are sometimes lazy to test their code) then that is an additional brownie point to your business. As you scale, make sure you have a dedicated team managing customer service/relationships and testing. You'll know when that happens.:-)
web marketing/ communications
I am going to assume that you don't have too much cash to burn. What you have is already alloted to hosting charges and paying the core team. The one thing we learnt early on is to take advantage of free techniques like SEO, Blogs, Social media to drive traffic to our site. Even till today, some of the blogs that we were mentioned in in 2008 are driving relevant traffic to the site every month. Someone who can understand SEO, web analytics, get in touch with bloggers, send out email newsletters, prepare press releases, build relatiobships and be a sort of a community manager on social networks will help you get the word out early on. In our case, I took this up early on as I am really interested in web marketing and who better to spread the vision of the company than the entrepreneur himself.
I think that is it. It is best to form your initial team, get started, measure as you go and switch gears as you learn more about your business and customers.
Have you built a team differently or have any other thoughts? Would love to hear your comments below.
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