Building a SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform is enticing…if it’s successful.
Unfortunately, most are not. The failure rate for product companies is rumored to be greater than 90%. That’s an incredibly high failure rate.
However, I feel the more important point is to study why these failures occur so frequently.
One BIG problem in this space is the rush to add software and technology into your product before your value proposition has been properly validated.
As such, you should really ask yourself – “Is our ‘product’ really ready for tech?”
Most of the time this answer is no. Unless you can consistently and repeatedly identify which prospect has which problem that is solved by your solution well enough to generate a healthy profit and run a sustainable business then no, you aren’t ready for tech.
Get our awesome product content delivered daily-ish to your inbox
So if you aren’t there yet what should you do?
Focus on discovery to learn more about all of these critical details so you can build a solution worth testing, but even then you really don’t need heavy tech or sometimes any at all. There’s a good chance that almost everything you want to test can be done by people as part of a process.
If you leverage this strategy, you’ll move faster and save a ton of capital.
Once you’ve verified everything I listed above, then you can work on optimizing the solution and at that point you’ll have a decent reason to start introducing more tech because that will help you scale.
Until you’re ready for scale, you should stay away from tech.