How to create and earn SaaS (Part 2 / invaluable experience of Russian ISV)

In the first part of the article, I talked about ways to optimize the cost / functionality when creating SaaS (Online) services. My approach to the problem was rather strategic (where to run, what to cut off), but not technological, and I had to start somewhere. What came out of this can be found here .

Today, as I promised, I have guests who openly share their recipes for creating successful SaaS stories. I note that most of the invited companies have already taken place in terms of business and are leading in their segments of automation (gurus). Came up and projects that are just beginning to win the hearts of users by leaps and bounds (beginners). Visitors today looked in: amoCRM, Moislad, Asoft CRM, opiny, Do.Docs, Zingaya, SMEOn and I asked everyone the same questions that will help replicate the experience of colleagues and pass it on to new teams. In my opinion, it turned out to be an interesting mix of opinions that will help the right approach to the creation of SaaS to all those who decide or have already decided to play on this field.
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Actually, questions:

1. How did the idea to create a service?
2. Development Toolkit and why this one?
3. Target audience of the service?
4. Economy while creating - methods, approaches, technologies.
5. Promotion strategy.
6. Friends / family / fools - where did you get funds for starting development?
7. Errors of the project and how to cope.
8. Dissenting opinion (bonus in the case).

Actually, the answers and start the SaaS Dev Party!

amoCRM CEO Mikhail Tokovinin (guru)

1. Yes, the idea is trivial - we did it more quickly, because we could, and not because we wanted this particular set of options.
2. LAMP + everyone, because the whole team worked on it.
3. We call it small working groups. These are sales departments from 3 to 20 people, which can be in both SMB and Enterprise. Our key customer is the head of sales.
4. I do not strongly believe that there are magic pills that can reduce development costs. A good specialist will do any bad things, even if the latter is provided with the best tools. In addition, good management and processes will improve the development of an order of magnitude more significant than any tool. Therefore, in essence, all development issues are team issues.
5. Promotion is also not distinguished by originality - advertising on the Internet, landing pages, conversion and all that. Sales are mostly direct. The only feature that we seriously consider integration with other services as a sales channel (and both ways, and that we will get customers and what we will give). I strongly believe in the idea, bundles of SaaSs with SaaSs, that this is the case when 1 + 1 = 3.
6. No, no investors, all on "their". I have already talked a lot about investments and my opinion (so far) that they are more likely to harm than good. A good product in our industry should take off without an investor. Yes, capital is needed, but we had our own - and this is the best scenario.
7. Yes, nothing critical or significant - everything is normal, all sorts of minor roughnesses. Perhaps the most significant mistake that underestimated the market and this product - they thought it was a much smaller story than we think now, therefore, initially spent a lot of time and effort on another solution. Could spend here and it would be more good. But this is all nonsense.
8. Yes, we are almost confident in our victory in the Russian market and are now rather concerned about their Western sales. If in 2011 we were very modest in assessing our prospects “there”, now there is a feeling that there are chances and they are not bad. We'll see. Now we are preparing a completely new version of the product, which we plan to compete in the USA. I hope we can surprise everyone.

Michael, clearly relaxed and confident in victory! I support his attitude towards integration with other services, but I would know with what - while the mass of services is not critical for overall integration (I’m talking about Russian ones).

Stepan Danilov , CEO DoDocs (newbie)

1. The idea of a visual aggregator of documentary sources arose when part of corporate documents was in the mail, part in the dropbox, part in local folders, and part on the corporate server. We needed an environment that would show all the company's documents in one place, with access rights and the ability to create communications around the document. And ideally, they also wanted visual web links to interesting companies' sites or articles. Tags were laid immediately, as they separated groups of documents by key departments of the company.
But later appeared personal tags, interspersed with publicly available.
2. At first there was a task to make a simple wiki, so the first prototype was made for myself on mediawiki. This is a media engine on php, they took it as a basis for the yii framework, but php as a language for server development remained. When they left the media gallery, it became clear that there would be complex JavaScript interfaces. When we switched to yii we started making external interfaces on the backbone. Then a joint editor was required, since php is a scripting programming language on it is difficult to keep permanent connections, so the part of the project that is responsible for the editor began to write to node.js
3. Our target audience is LLC, IP and remote teams. We compete with task managers and webdav repositories, but nonetheless the market is big enough to fit everything.
4. There is almost no savings on development, but we have created one beta server, where tester companies work. There are no testers or outsourcing ones. With automated testing, by the way, we don’t really, because we can’t take the time, and it would be possible to write tests for interfaces.
5. We base our promotion strategy on niche solutions with pre-made settings. Now we are rewriting something and we want to split products into b2b and b2c, the last of which will be free
6. Your money. We don’t hope to find investments in Russia, while there are not enough resources to enter other markets. We are moving as fast as we can afford.
7. There were always mistakes, but in the summer, after a series of articles about a trip to Boston, about 200 hundred companies registered and they all simultaneously “called support” because they did not understand how and what to do. We did not have time to write hints and test it in some places, therefore, we “died”. We stopped publicizing PR and are preparing redesign and intuitive interfaces. This is our kind of pivot.
8. we are preparing 3 circuit.
- Saas
- Semi-manual version (logic in the cloud, exchange of indices, storage in a closed local loop)
- Paranoid version (box version: everything is in the local loop)

Stepan is witnessing the development of “in the course of the play” from a simple wiki to the shuttle with a change of development tools, an excellent understanding of Central Asia, and a fresh idea of automating work with disparate company documents, competing with Task. He also does and rework, probably on this and saves.

soft RM , MO Alexey Fitiskin (guru and veteran, I would add)

1. The idea to make ASoft CRM came from one of the customers, who turned to ASoft for customized development. The product was started under him 10 years ago (in 2004), after which they began to universalize the functionality and adapt the product to Russian reality.
2. The development tool in the company has already been - Stellart - Asoft's own platform, which was used and used in the development of custom systems. This technology initially allowed to make the web-system ASoft CRM, which later turned into a SaaS solution.
3. The presence of its own technology for the development allows the company ASoft to focus on companies representing small and medium businesses, but there is no industry binding. On the basis of ASoft CRM, a dozen industry versions and about a hundred integration services are implemented, which exchange information with various specialized systems. For example, in the banking sector with LSI and ABS, in real estate with the Winner service, in logistics with maps and GPS, in trade organizations with solutions based on 1C, etc.
4. Having our own platform, which has existed for over 20 years and is constantly evolving, allows us to solve specific tasks of customers in a short time and for minimal budgets, as well as constantly develop boxed and SaaS products.
5. The quality of our projects forms a certain information background, ASOFT is actively recommended as a developer, and the company's products as ready-to-work solutions that can be flexibly customized and even customized to fit any requirements. They are recommended not only by clients, but also by partners with whom we often integrate and work on mutually beneficial conditions of partnership programs. There are, of course, both the marketing budget and certain activities online and offline, which provide a steady stream of lead generation.
6. We did not attract investments and were oriented in the business as a whole to the client’s tasks, which were solved with adequate money and on time.
7. This made it possible to avoid mistakes in the development, as when creating standard solutions, we focused on the standard tasks of the clients.
8. We were the pioneers of the web and learned how to work optimally with a bunch of technology — standard solutions — customer needs.

Effective savings ASOFT in the presence of its own development tools and still have the courage to start creating WEB business applications back in 2004, when the Internet was actually not very.

opiny EO Dmitry Chistov , CMO Evgeny Vasyuk (guru) .

1. June 2010 - the idea of creating the Copiny project is born, when Dmitry Chistov is trying to find a convenient solution on the Russian market to support the users of his Internet projects. There were no high-quality Russian-speaking platforms, and the idea to make a big project arose. Dmitry sold all his projects and began work on Copiny.
2. We mainly use open source and free technologies and development products, which eliminates the purchase of licenses.
3. Central Asia - heads of customer support, customer care, marketing directors.
4. We save on development at the expense of the office in Bryansk, the rent, maintenance and salary is lower than in Moscow.
5. The market of client communities in Russia is only in its infancy, therefore the strategy is to create it, informing potential clients about client communities, benefits, stories of successful implementations. Inbound marketing is the main channel for attracting customers. In addition, the openness of the platform and copyrights contribute to the viral distribution of the product.
6. Raised angelic investments from Pavel Cherkashin, and then from SoftLine VP in the amount of $ 500 thousand. Plus they initially invested their money.
7. Errors here
8. In our case, the freemium model did not work as needed and we refused the free tariff. The fact is that free users and those who paid us were completely different segments that practically didn’t overlap, so there was no conversion and no clear restrictions for switching to paid plans.

I always admired the approach of the guys to put a good theoretical basis under the practice and even admit mistakes from the point of view of logic, textbooks and speak openly - yes, they were wrong for this reason. Keep it up!

Quickme PO Alexey Kalachnikov (newbie)

1.Organically, the product has grown from e-mail - collaborative mail. Additional files, Support, on the approach of Calls and PM were included in the bundle. It was necessary to solve the positioning task - the answer to it was that the product was not UC, but certain “multi-level communications” critical for business. I suppose that to convey to the user, how Support may not be a tool for controlling execution and not ITIL, but communication via the same e-mail and through the form on the website it will take time and effort.
2.Based on many solutions. Open source On the client side: html, css, javascripts, framework knockout.js, jquery. On the php server.
3. We make bets on small and medium business, companies that work in the customer b2b segment of sales or services. Among the users are, and developers, and lawyers, and chain stores. In addition, we are ready to make large mail implementations in tens of thousands of boxes - Business Mail is sold as a separate module.
4. Start with a unique bundle and do not yet understand what this combination will lead to. Following the example of ASANA, we decided not to administer access rights - for a small team this is not critical at all, went to ITIL Support and made it in the form of group chat - all employees can answer questions, complementing each other.
5.Stavki on the affiliate channel. Partners include leading cloud providers and system integrators, bootstrapping and no offline promotion. The leading product in the bundle is mail and if we advertise, then only it. We believe in integration with platforms - ISP, Jelastic, Parallels. About integration with other SaaS services in the candidates platform voximplant.com from Zingaya
6. The spin-off story and the money did not attract plus partners immediately began to earn, which proves that even an unknown brand can sell well through a strong partner channel.
7. Not yet, but I am sure that everything is still ahead. The potential error hypothesis is that the service cannot be sold without mail. We'll see a little more and maybe get away from ID adresse@mail.com
8. Strange as it may seem, the first months of work have shown that among large corporate clients there are many who want to switch from email solutions of world vendors to lighter ones, and this is good news. Plans to develop service in the CIS and not to touch the global history. As long as the “Business-Mail” + “Files” pair is in demand, this is encouraging. Cooperation with the integrator suddenly led to the creation of a banking solution and is already selling in the TOP 10 banks. Also, we are proud of our client. Lenin is very.

You do not praise yourself.

Alexey Ailarov ( http://seopult.tv/persona/aylarov_alexey/ ) CEO Zingaya (guru).

1. The idea of the Zingaya service arose when we were developing an IP PBX and a SIP softphone, it seemed that IP telephony was too complicated and confusing for ordinary users and we decided to try to simplify everything to the maximum, reduce the call to one or two clicks.
2 At that time (2008), the only available technology in browsers that allowed implementing something like this was Adobe Flash, the first version of the server part was in Java using open source developments, but then everything had to be rewritten from scratch in C ++ . For programming the client used Action Script.
3. Target audience - any site visitor who wants to quickly contact the site owner (by voice) to ask a question about a product or service (for sales) or solve a problem (for support). Well, you need a microphone.
4. Difficult question, we try not to save once again on development and technologies, as in our case, this directly affects the quality of the product.
5. First, bootstraps were long enough, they created their own technology, service and started the first sales, and then attracted investments of just over $ 1M to scale sales and further develop technologies.
6. - see 5 -
7. The main mistakes were when trying to hire people for sales and promotion in the US market. Entering foreign markets requires substantial investment and knowledge of the surrounding reality in these markets.
8. Recently, we launched a new product platform for developers of communication services (this is PaaS) voximplant.com , any web or mobile developer can quickly create telephone services, chat rooms, etc. and embed it all into your products.

Alexey is building a global company and may well give advice on how to bring solutions to the American market - welcome! Errors, according to Alexei, are the wrong choice of people, not technology (the right position when at the head of sales and drive is support!) Yes, and open source developments are not always good in complex technological stories.

Mysklad CEO Askar Rakhimberdiev (guru * 2)

1. We decided to make a program for the warehouse, only online. We thought that in Russia there is a hell of a number of warehouses, and they all dream of working in SaaS. (Not really.)
2. Now there are many different technologies that allow fast and high-quality web applications. It all depends on the developers, not the technology. The main thing is not to choose unknowingly some dying relic of the Perl type.
3. From individual entrepreneurs (one-person business) to companies of 30-50 employees. They sell something physical that you can touch with your hands - toys, cosmetics, spare parts. They sell wholesale, retail or online.
4. No need to save, it is better to earn more due to good sales. Therefore, we constantly consider what product features and sales channels bring in more money, and develop them.
5. With the help of bootstrap we managed to launch a beta version. But the first paying customers appeared only after the first round of investment. I think that a full-fledged B2B cloud service can only be launched with investments - this is quite expensive entertainment (both development and sales).
6. There were two rounds of investment, the first from http://asi.ee/en and the second from 1C.
7. The main mistake is to quickly do a lot of things and see which ones work (this applies to both the product and sales). This is a very cool thing that can be done in a startup, but it is impossible - in a large company. Actually, this is why (and only because of this) a startup can win, although it has fewer resources. We often thought too long, planned, programmed.
8. Products for business is difficult to do, but interesting. They are harder to run than many B2C services, but if you still get an audience, it will be more loyal. I want to think that we all - cloud services - are helping to grow a little
domestic business.

Askar, who does not know - this is “Yuri Gagarin of the Russian SaaS” - he did the service and he “flew”. The bets on the vertical solution, experiments with the product and sales did their job by 20 percent, the rest is hellish performance of the team and personally Askar, I'm sure.

SMEOn CEO Yevgeny Agibalov

1. Once we started as an order development business team. Soon we were amazed at how many tasks in this sector are of the same type. That is, in fact, all 100% of our clients have automated their work through Excel and have placed this Excel table on the Internet so that there are no differences between the versions of different employees, rigidly define an algorithm for the sequence of actions with it, so that there is no confusion in the work. And it is hard to differentiate access rights for employees, so that a female trainee from the sales department sees only the data she needs and doesn’t accidentally delete anything. Actually, the idea of service was born, as a simple wizard for creating accounting systems for business. This is a wizard in which a person who does not know how to program needs to answer three questions: specify the data structure (columns of his Excel table), draw a sequence diagram (Well, for example, cold call-> commercial proposal-> meeting-> contract), and set up groups (: : , . : )
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after SaaS Dev Party — “Beck Loser” c

Alexey Kalachnikov

Blog author http://www.bootstrap24.ru/

Materials series "How to create and earn on SaaS"

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/217283/

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How to create and earn SaaS (Part 2 / invaluable experience of Russian ISV)

Actually, questions:

Actually, the answers and start the SaaS Dev Party!

More articles: