SaaS development goes through 6 stages: envisioning, platform evaluating, planning, subscribing, developing, and operations. They iterate if you need new features and updates. To go through them you need to choose your model for outsourcing saas development or have an already operating in-house team.
ENVISIONING. This is a preparatory stage. Here you need to evaluate the market, define the qualities and behavior patterns of your target audience, and decide whether the world needs your project at all. Often, start-up creators think their idea is new and appealing when in fact, it is already successfully implemented with Salesforce or Microsoft. So, as soon as you offer something people cannot find anywhere else, make the identification of business needs, outline the budget, and create a short- and long-term plan to follow. During this stage, you’ll start looking for an outsourcing team to work on your project. If you don’t have tech expertise, you`ll need their pieces of advice in the forthcoming steps.
EVALUATING. The first thing you do here is to clarify the requirements, and for that, you’ll need a good business analyst. You can hire a freelancer. However, good outsourcing teams have one. Then you decide what technical structure and functionality are necessary for your MVP – the first version of the app. The development team will help you to evaluate security and data privacy issues, choose management tools, and understand the limitations
PLANNING. This is a final preparation, where you formulate requirements and write documentation. The team gets the finalized plans concerning the project’s schedule. When will you have calls? Where will you report about the work that’s done? During that stage, these questions cannot remain unanswered.
SUBSCRIBING. Here you choose the cloud-provider, make final decisions about architecture and pricing and, well, subscribe. In SaaS, it is a very important stage because it is difficult to migrate to other clouds later, especially if your project becomes larger.
DEVELOPING. Here you feel the power of SaaS outsourcing to the fullest extent. The development team will create the core features for the chosen architecture. They develop front- and backend or your app, deploy and test. Later, you will need their support when implementing updates, tackling security issues and streamlining data synchronization.
OPERATIONS. This is the final stage before you decide the next version would be good. Here you evaluate the quality of the product and how well it works with your target audience. After gathering the feedback, you decide what else can you do to improve the service and… here we are again, at the ENVISIONING stage.