lessons learned building enterprise saas companies
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Lessons Learned Building Enterprise SaaS Presentation to Edison CTO Roundtable George McKevitt, Ph.D. December 7, 2016
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© 2015 Compliance Science, Inc. - Confidential 2 2
Lessons Learned
• Building the product is only part of it
• The SaaS model is built on trust
• Customer Service is everything
• Product management is hard and can be contentious
• Enterprise expectations will be much higher than you will expect
• SaaS companies serving enterprises must act like enterprises
© 2015 Compliance Science, Inc. - Confidential 3 3
The SaaS Model is Built on Trust
• Uptime & performance • Redundancy, Rapid failure detection, Quick failover
• Scalability – know your peaks
• Monitor, monitor, monitor–know before your customers do
• Share your SLA results
• Expect security to be paramount – one breach can put your company out of business
• 15% of our spend
• SOC Report, IDS, log monitoring, Security Operations Center, AV
• Penetration testing, 3rd party code reviews
• Hundreds of security DDQ’s a year
• SaaS companies need to match or better the customer
© 2015 Compliance Science, Inc. - Confidential 4 4
Customer Service is Everything
• Most SaaS customers leave due to poor customer service
• Even moderate churn makes it very difficult and expensive to grow subscription business
• Prohibitive if your churn is high
• Top performing SaaS companies
• Annual renewals on a customer count basis above 90%
• On a dollar basis over 100% renewals due to up-sells into this installed base.
• Need the ability to implement customers efficiently
• Expect to build internal tools
• Customer service can limit small companies to local markets
• How to support a single customer in Asia with 9-6 EST support time?
© 2015 Compliance Science, Inc. - Confidential 5 5
Product Management is Hard
• Often shifting priorities
• Customization Requests are Inevitable
• Ask the question: Is it applicable to other customers?
• Strive to provide multiple products from one platform
• Economies of scale
• Related products to upsell
• Let your customers help define the product - you’re solving their problems.
• You may end up somewhere completely different than you intended
• Balancing the customer and company needs is key
• Learn to say No when necessary / Hardest thing you can do
• Adoption is the key to success and the barometer of your business
• Maintain only one set of code regardless of pressures
© 2015 Compliance Science, Inc. - Confidential 6 6
Enterprise expectations will be much higher than you will expect
• Security and privacy are paramount • Managing PII for others comes with high requirements
• Security concerns can be a deal-breaker
• Enterprises overwhelm you with people and requests
• You are going to have to integrate with them
• Scalability & criticality of the service to the business
• B2B is different than B2C
• They will hold you to SLA’s
• Enterprises often outgrow SaaS vendor
• You need to examine the types of customers you’re targeting and potentially adjust that target.
• Reason could be functionality, scalability, security, customer service
• How far do you go?
© 2015 Compliance Science, Inc. - Confidential 7 7
SaaS Companies Serving Enterprises Must Act Like Enterprises
• Enterprise clients – best and worst thing that can happen
• Even small companies must be on par with large clients
• Security and operations need to match your customers
• Successful companies learn to scale quickly
• Teams, on-boarding, technology, processes
• Variable staffing is critical
• SaaS teams often change as you get into enterprise customers
• The cloud is your friend
• Technology must be supportable to support SLA’s
• Instrumentation, logging, error handling
• Hosting models
• Multitenant is required, expect single tenant & on premises requests
• Licensing can be a large cost – choose technology wisely
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