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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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


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


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?


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


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?


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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