The best practices to scale your SaaS startup

Launching a new SaaS startup in 2019 is challenging. Not all startups succeed. But if properly structured and executed the result can be rewarding. There is very little room for mistakes and miscalculations in this cut-throat and challenging atmosphere. This article will list the best practices on how you can scale your startup while avoiding general mistakes.

Do not scale early

Take it slow, when you are not ready for it. If you are still in the process of – Market Validation, MVP Completion or Minimum Paying Customer Target stop now. Continue working and go back to work, and meet your minimum paying customer target and then start thinking about scaling.

If you’re through these phases successfully, you are ready to begin the fundamental SaaS scaling process. Also, make sure to think about customer support, billing and continue to validate your market.

Scale slowly

It’s vital for startups to scale gradually. It’s not a sprint but a marathon. Not all startups can and will viral overnight. The hard truth is that this “big moment” will never happen.

Scaling should happen gradual, and you do not have to scale until you need to. Prioritize your needs and scale accordingly cause each scaling stage will cost you resources and time.

Automate billing

Almost all SaaS businesses choose to go with the subscription billing model. It’s 2019, and if you’re spending time sending manual invoices, reminders to customers, manually tracking trials, then you may have to start thinking about providing tiered SaaS offerings and completely overhauling your billing system first.

Tiered pricing: You may have rolled out with a single-tiered product. But as you grow your customer base, you will be inclined to offer more varieties of your software.

Auto-billing: Automatically charge customers at every billing cycle during their renewal will save you days of work every month. It will make your entire billing process fast, efficient, and transparent for you and the customer.

Get to know your customers better

Your relationship with your customer starts as soon as they land on your website. You may have already started using a customer relationship management system to manage your customers. But it isn’t just about managing customers. You have to gather more information about your users enough, to serve them better ergo retain them. If not, you are losing a customer.

CRM systems like Apptivo can help gather user information from various sources such as customer support, engagement to the newsletter, etc., and help them store in one centralized location. This is mostly because all the services are tightly interlinked with one another that it makes it easy for sales or support people to know about the customer – past interactions, interests, etc., in one-click instantly.

Conclusion

Do not start scaling until you have gathered all your requirements and fully understand the scope of your SaaS scale processes. Give your business enough time to mature and then start scaling. No software ever works well when it’s rushed.

Take advantage of the tools that are out there. Apptivo Suite is a great place to start scaling up your SaaS startup. It covers almost everything that a SaaS business would need like CRM, email campaigns, help desk, project management, billing, and finances.