The document provides technical guidance for SaaS startups. It discusses challenges startups face like short funding runways and high failure rates. It recommends rapid prototyping techniques to quickly validate ideas. The document advises forming skilled teams and establishing best practices for version control, testing, and scalability. It also covers multi-tenancy, APIs, analytics, security, and balancing quality with timing to quickly obtain user feedback. The overarching message is to quickly build minimum viable products and prioritize early user validation over perfection.

1. Technical guidance in
SaaS Startups
Dr. Malinda Kapuruge
@kaushalye
08th May 2019

2. What is a Startup?
Success is
not
guaranteed
New
company
Limited
Budget
Angel
Investors
Small
team
Business
opportunity
Innovativ
e
Growth
impactful
The 50 -100 or 500 rule
$50 million revenue in 12 months, 100+ employees,Worth $500+ million
A proper definition is hard to find …

3. This talk is …

4. Challenges and
pitfalls
Technical
Guidance
Questions
SaaS
Startups Technical
know-how
Leadership
But, interrupt me anytime…

5. Challenges
Startup

6. Runway is NOT that long • Funding is limited
• Unexpected expenses, e.g., marketing
• Investors
• 9/10 Failure (Forbes)

7. Source: www.startupxplore.com

8. Changes
• Frequent
• Market conditions
• New opportunities
• Technology
• Responsibilities

9. Competition
• Competitors
• Time to market
• MVP

10. Pitfalls …

11. Pitfalls - three Rs
• Prof. Noam Wasserman - Harvard Business School
• Relationship decisions
• Family and friends. Having a firewall.
• Roles decisions
• Many C-level roles makes it difficult to come to a decision
• Rewards decisions
• Flexibility in equity arrangement (many do 50-50 and get locked up )

12. Pitfalls
• Co-founders with technical background
• What you wanted to do Vs What you ended-up doing
• Your own success
• Keep up with the demand
• Not being able to scale to the demand
• Product market fit
• Understanding the user base

14. Technical guidance…

15. Technical
Guidance
Technology
choices
Proof of
concept
Forming teams
Informed
business
decisions
Avoiding
disasters
Futuristic
Cost-conscious Quality

16. Technical
guidance
-
phases
Pre-MVP
Post-MVP
Scale

17. The arsenal

18. Rapid prototyping
• Idea -> People -> Validate
• An Excel sheet? A paper prototype? Whatever floats your boat
• Balancing, Speed - Functional – Presentation
• Wireframes
• Axure
• Balsamiq

19. Rapid prototyping
• PaaS
• Heroku
• Digital Ocean
• IaaS
• GCP
• AWS
Becoming quick and easy, day by day

20. Example:- backend service – quick and easy !

21. On-premise IaaS PaaS SaaS
Application
Data
Runtime
Middleware
O/S
Virtualization
Computing
Storage
Networking
Manage yourself Managed by the service

22. Implementation vs Integration
• Build our own?
• What’s out there?
• Can we use it?
• Look for (and possibly educate the business on)
• Vendor lock-in issues
• Pricing models
• Scalability
• Stability
• APIs

23. Forming a team
• Attracting good developers
• Salaries
• Tech stack
• A good tech stack is attractive to devs (perhaps more than the salaries)
• Your own network
• Interviews
• Expectations / responsibilities / deviations
• Broader skills
• Mix skills - full stack – flexibility to change
• A competent team could be the differentiator among competitors

24. Establish a good team culture
• Commitment and respect
• Lead vs Manage
• Experimentation is an integral part
• Brainstorming
• Hackathons
• May unearth many potentials
• Ready to Fail, but Fail early
• Sometimes have to say NO!
• Focus
Innovation is saying NO
to 1000 things
- Steve Jobs

25. Guiding the team to adhere to best practices
• Rush !
• Not ignoring best practices
• Example:
• Version controlling
• Containers
• Tests
• CI/CD pipelines
• No need a lot of upfront time
• May save a lot of time and effort later

26. Scalability
• One of the biggest challenges for
Startups
• Start small but ready to grow
• Vertical vs Horizontal scaling
• Layered architecture
• Databases
• Use cloud – it’s good.
• Serverless
• ECS clusters
• Autoscaling

27. Cost $$$
• Remember?
the short runway!
• Where can I save
some money ?
• Usage
• Strategies
• Free tiers
• 1 mil req/month
• Tools
https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

28. https://www.stax.io/
“takes the
guesswork out of
AWS. Now you
can easily answer
the questions
about cost,
wastage and
compliance that
matter most to

29. Security
• Identity
• Single-sign-on (SSO)
• XSS
• Sensitive vs not-so-sensitive data
• Storage
• Session timeouts
• Penetration testing
• Vulnerability assessments
• Third party organizations

30. Product and User behavior analytics
• What our costumers are doing with our product?
• Interactions
• Data
• Multiple devices / platforms
• Trends
• User drop-offs
• Referral sites / sources of users
• Advertising
• ROI
• May change the direction of startup

31. Product and User behavior analytics
• MixPanel
• HotJar
• Google Analytics

32. APIs
• Public APIs
• RESTful
• Norm
• Any good reason to deviate?
• Version controlled
• Tenants
• Users of UI
• Consumers of API

33. APIs – example strategies
• Tenant independent URIs [api.xyzervice.com/v1/thingy]
• Clean URI, Common documentation
• Need some way to identify tenant, e.g., oAuth, headers
• Issues with caching in proxy
• Tenant specific subdomain [tenant1. xyzervice.com/v1/thingy]
• Possible to have service level as well as tenant level cookies
• DNS provisioning overhead (if manual)
• Wildcard SSL certificates
• Tenant specific URI [api. xyzervice.com/v1/tenant1/thingy]
• More RESTful
• Simple to implement

34. Multi-tenancy –
Resource isolation
• Multi-tenancy is a key characteristic in
SaaS
• Economies of scale
• Early decisions
• Sharing underlying resources
• Application isolation
• Data isolation
• Noisy neighbours
• Privacy

35. NO need to worry if
NO one is using your
product!

36. Quality
product
Make sure the key
functionalities are delivered
Must haves vs Good to haves
User experience

37. Testing strategies
• Building the right product ! vs Building the product right !!
• Separate QA team would be a luxury you may not have
• What are the alternatives?
• Test coverage - gates
• Crowdsourcing
• Third-party, e.g., Bugwolf

38. Quality vs Timing
• Showcasing
• Doesn’t need to be the best thing you have ever built
• Does just enough to land the product on hands of the users
• Early feedback is critical
• MVP – Minimum Viable Product
• It is OK to be little ugly as long as it actually solve the intended problem.

39. Questions?