Day 2: Building a SaaS Product in 100 Days

Note: This is a continuation of my Building a SaaS product in 100 Days blog series

Mind is a monkey

Alright, today has been about documenting some of the zillion thoughts, ideas, and features that are going on in my mind. My mind is in chaos thinking of 100 things without finishing a single thought. So, I thought of writing them down to get some clarity on what's needed, what's not needed, and what is sufficient to have an MVP ready.

Exploring Competitors

First up, I googled "Property management software" and went through demos of some of the freely available version. Made a list of the websites for reference in the future. While checking the demos, I made a list of all the features they provided and some that I had in mind which weren't available.

This exercise gave me a good idea of what features are generally being offered in the existing products and UI design ideas. I think getting to know your (can I call) "competitors" is a must and should homework.

Target Audience

I think some of the questions you need to ask yourself before going ahead are:

Who are the target audience?
Are there more than one type of audience? If yes, who are they?
Will my go-to-market strategy would be to target businesses or individuals?
How many interfaces/portals are required?
Does each user type have a different portal or does everyone use the same?
Would the URL be the same for all customers or should I create a sub-domain for each client?

Thinking of these questions gave me some clarity on who will use my product and how will they use it. Once, I had that, it was slightly clear what features are required for each user type.

Feedback

I ran a Twitter poll to get an idea from others. There were only 7 ppl who voted at the time of writing this blog, nevertheless, it was good to have that experience of asking for feedback. I am sure I can get more feedback in the future.

About My Product

Users: Tenants, Landlords/Owners, Property Management Companies Portals: One tenant with varied features for each user type Sub-domains: I am still not sure if this is required but I think it will a good selling point for businesses to have a website with their own name. But I think it is also an extra cost to maintain subdomains so it should be a premium feature that won't be available in the free version

Next Steps

In the next couple of days, I want to do:

More research on existing products
Think of all the use cases, end to end flows how a user would interact with the website
Design a basic landing page as it is just editing an existing template

Conclusion

I had an urge to open the IDE and write some code for basic model classes in Java. But as I mentioned in my yesterday's blog, I wanted to hold off coding until I have a clearer idea of the product I am going to build.

Follow me on Twitter at Tech Hustler for regular updates.

If you want to keep yourself motivated, I would recommend you to check out Ten Ways To Make Money As A Developer book which is very well written and quite motivating in fact.

Cheers,

Tech Hustler