Hello, SaaS | Creating a new product and why MVP does not work
I started writing my blog from a post about creating SaaS products . The post turned out to be rather superficial, not even superficial, and this was the first iteration into a very large cell. Today's post will be exclusively practical and dedicated to New product development (NPD) at Dental Cloud .
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Let me remind you that we are doing the dental automation service, which a) classic b2b b) it contains all the architectural requirements of NITS for SaaS - multi-tenancy, cross-platform c) and we implement the requirements on MS Azure. It is important that I do not talk about many SaaSs that have taken only SaaS as a business model, for example, I would refer witget.com to this category. or www.jivosite.ru
From the business point of view, we play in the “purple ocean” - only in Russia there are about 30 players in the segment of 10,000 potential customers and we need to be a priori better at the product level. My personal opinion is that MVP will not work in our history. Let me explain why - we will not sell the MVP and it will not be needed by anyone. We will not sell due to the fact that MVP will always lose and faith in Lean Startup can play a cruel joke with us. In the segment of the automation of dentistry, there are already a lot of comodizi solutions, successful cases, practices, and we will always be at the end of the short list in a queue to a potential client. Those. we understood that we would never sell the service in the standard areas of automation - we have this CRM-BPM (EHR - Electronic Health Records)
What we will sell, and not distribute, as freemium:
There is an exit
In a situation of a catch-up, the team was faced with the task (what to do, Karl?) What should the product become in order for it to become not MVP, but
The task was solved after about 2 months of discussions and the team concluded that Dental Cloud should lie at the junction of the classic automation paradigms of CRM-BPM with the addition of the Community component as separate integrated services or positioning it as a platform. At the same time, we did not move away from the paradigms of creating SaaS, but added a communication component to the relatively simple automation functionality. So, the share of automation of the clinic's internal processes is preserved in the platform - 30%. All modules are not overloaded with excess, and self-sufficient for small dental clinics.
So far, we do not fully understand whether Dental Cloud will become a platform or we will sell sets of services — this is a question of the future and experiments, but it is already clear that we, at least, do not compete with most of the existing solutions in the segment.
New approach
What are theses to the development of SaaS, I added from the practice of Dental Cloud and they, rather, mandatory conditions for the launch of a successful product.
Earlier, I focused on the fact that SaaS:
Of the bright recent examples of the implementation of all my theses on NPD - this is Slack - the guys just took everything and turned it upside down - gathered all business applications around communications and eventually won.
* my previous materials from the “Hello, SaaS” series can be read here.
')
Let me remind you that we are doing the dental automation service, which a) classic b2b b) it contains all the architectural requirements of NITS for SaaS - multi-tenancy, cross-platform c) and we implement the requirements on MS Azure. It is important that I do not talk about many SaaSs that have taken only SaaS as a business model, for example, I would refer witget.com to this category. or www.jivosite.ru
From the business point of view, we play in the “purple ocean” - only in Russia there are about 30 players in the segment of 10,000 potential customers and we need to be a priori better at the product level. My personal opinion is that MVP will not work in our history. Let me explain why - we will not sell the MVP and it will not be needed by anyone. We will not sell due to the fact that MVP will always lose and faith in Lean Startup can play a cruel joke with us. In the segment of the automation of dentistry, there are already a lot of comodizi solutions, successful cases, practices, and we will always be at the end of the short list in a queue to a potential client. Those. we understood that we would never sell the service in the standard areas of automation - we have this CRM-BPM (EHR - Electronic Health Records)
What we will sell, and not distribute, as freemium:
- Future expectations - what the product will be in time N
- Clouds vista
There is an exit
In a situation of a catch-up, the team was faced with the task (what to do, Karl?) What should the product become in order for it to become not MVP, but
- competitive at launch
- remained simple and clear to the user
The task was solved after about 2 months of discussions and the team concluded that Dental Cloud should lie at the junction of the classic automation paradigms of CRM-BPM with the addition of the Community component as separate integrated services or positioning it as a platform. At the same time, we did not move away from the paradigms of creating SaaS, but added a communication component to the relatively simple automation functionality. So, the share of automation of the clinic's internal processes is preserved in the platform - 30%. All modules are not overloaded with excess, and self-sufficient for small dental clinics.
So far, we do not fully understand whether Dental Cloud will become a platform or we will sell sets of services — this is a question of the future and experiments, but it is already clear that we, at least, do not compete with most of the existing solutions in the segment.
New approach
What are theses to the development of SaaS, I added from the practice of Dental Cloud and they, rather, mandatory conditions for the launch of a successful product.
- Creation of a component in the frontend products through integration or own services-add-ins
- integration with other services - for example, voximplant.com
- multi - communication component at the level of "user of the application - client of the user" will help you to win
- availability of Rest API and connectors with cloud platforms, for example, APS format apsstandard.org
Earlier, I focused on the fact that SaaS:
- This is the functionality that solves one client problem.
- NITS compliance
- No extra - administrator rights, for example
Of the bright recent examples of the implementation of all my theses on NPD - this is Slack - the guys just took everything and turned it upside down - gathered all business applications around communications and eventually won.
* my previous materials from the “Hello, SaaS” series can be read here.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292762/
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