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How to improve SaaS time to market with a SaaS boilerplate
- Authors
- Name
- Nico Botha
- @nwbotha
SaaS only keeps getting bigger and bigger. The SaaS industry has grown by over 500% in the last five years alone.
Judging from the numbers, that's not going to change anytime soon. The days of hosting all of your apps and software are long gone. At present, organizations with more than 1,000 employees use an average of 150+ SaaS applications.
For one thing, who's got time to install and maintain that many applications? Business owners and team members are already stressed out and overworked.
For another, that number's only likely to keep growing. With the unprecedented rise of remote work across businesses of all sizes, the need for software as a service is only going to continue to rise.
This offers a unique opportunity for SaaS marketers. The time to act is now, and a SaaS boilerplate is just the thing to drastically reduce the time to market.
How is this possible, though? How can a SaaS boilerplate reduce the time to market so drastically?
Let's start by examining the SaaS boilerplate itself. Once you have an understanding of how a masterful template can optimize your SaaS business, the answer will be obvious.
What is a SaaS Boilerplate?
When you're building cloud-based apps or web services, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel. One of the main reasons software as a solution has been enjoying such an exponential explosion in popularity is the availability of pre-made solutions.
Collectively, this is known as a SaaS boilerplate.
A SaaS boilerplate is a template that handles many of these technical considerations for you. This could include anything from handling database connectivity to site-wide search functions.
SaaS boilerplates are widely available on any platform where web apps are routinely hosted and deployed such as AWS or Vercel. These templates free up your development team to focus on more important work.
Example features of a SaaS boilerplate include:
- Logins
- Registration
- Database integration
- Payment and subscription handling
- Social media integration
- Newsletter subscription
- Contact forms
A SaaS boilerplate saves your development team the trouble of tackling redundant tasks. It also saves them from having to write custom code for every single customer and client.
When you think of it this way, you'll realize that SaaS boilerplates are already a part of nearly every development environment. At this point, we're not hand-coding every login or share to social media button after all.
Now let's dive into how a SaaS boilerplate can streamline your development process and marketing strategy.
How SaaS Boilerplates Reduce Time to Market
With the rapid rise of SaaS, there's been a surge in competition. Recent research shows that the cost of customer acquisition has risen by 55% in just five years.
Not only has this created the need to build new products as cost-effectively as possible, but it also created a push to drastically cut time to market by any means necessary.
SaaS boilerplates help you do both at the same time without sacrificing quality.
SaaS Boilerplates Handle Basic Functionality
In today's digital economy, nearly every digital product has some sort of universal feature. Some of these functions, like User Authentication, can be quite tricky and time-consuming if you were to try and code them by hand.
Other examples of basic functions handled by SaaS boilerplates include:
- Processing payments
- User management
- Handling subscriptions
- Email templates
Delegating these basic functions frees your development and marketing teams up to focus on the specifics. After all, your SaaS unique value proposition is what leads to actual conversions and subscriptions.
SaaS Boilerplates Let You Manage Users
Almost every SaaS provider offers some form of free tier service. Keeping track of users at different levels is an integral part of every SaaS marketing strategy.
By using a SaaS boilerplate, it becomes easy to keep track of users with a time-based trial, for example. It's simple to monitor how long they've been using the trial version.
This can become an integral part of a marketing automation strategy, as well. You can set up automated marketing messaging to alert users that their subscription is about to expire, for example.
This further frees up your marketing team to tackle tasks that require a human touch.
SaaS Boilerplates Ensure Security
When it comes to SaaS, user trust is everything. If there's a data breach, that trust can be broken. Once it's broken, it may never be regained.
A SaaS boilerplate is guaranteed to comply with the latest security protocols and standards. A SaaS boilerplate for database integration ensures that your databases are set up as securely as possible. Even better still, it does so in far less time than if you were to implement the integrations by hand.
SaaS Boilerplate For Serverless Hosting
Serverless solutions are a popular choice for hosting SaaS applications. SaaS boilerplates let you deploy your app directly to popular serverless hosting platforms like Heroku or Vercel straight from a GitHub repository.
A SaaS Boilerplate Saves Time On Blogging
Blogging is an essential part of marketing any SaaS solution. Unfortunately, that means one more thing to do when you're already feeling overwhelmed.
SaaS boilerplates let you easily create blog posts directly from your text editor. Instead of having to load proprietary blog platforms or software, you can simply write your blog posts in markdown and have stunning, inspiring blog posts with the click of a single button.
This means you can use SaaS boilerplates as a cornerstone of your inbound and content marketing strategies.
SaaS Boilerplates Keep You Motivated
One of the greatest challenges facing any SaaS provider is seeing the project through to completion. There is nothing more demotivating than having a great vision for a product or service and then losing weeks and months to some sort of technical difficulty.
SaaS boilerplates can save you an incredible amount of time during the development process. Technical considerations like data security or payment processing require high levels of sophisticated programming and expert programming skills.
SaaS boilerplates take care of all of that coding for you. As a result, you can focus on more important matters that will be more useful for growing your business and getting your product to market as quickly as possible.
SaaS Boilerplates Help You Create a Consistent Brand
Consistency is everything when building a business or brand. This is especially true with new businesses when customers are still building a connection and establishing trust.
It's vital to ensure a consistent tone and branding across every single component of your SaaS. This can be trickier than you might think if you don't consolidate your development and marketing strategies.
Using SaaS boilerplates lets you specify every single moving part of your development and marketing strategies. You can integrate automated messaging and marketing emails, for example.
This way, every single time your customers interact with your brand they're getting a consistent message. This is integral to building a solid connection with your customers, which is especially vital when you're converting trial subscriptions to paid users.
Final Thoughts on SaaS Boilerplates
It's an exciting time for SaaS providers. Customers have never been more open to opening their organizations to outside service providers. It's the perfect time to launch a SaaS service - if it's done correctly!
Time is of the essence if you want to take advantage of the current trend. We don't have weeks or months to get lost in tedious technical considerations like how to authenticate users or process payments securely. Unfortunately, these are some of the most important parts of ensuring a SaaS' success.
This is why SaaS boilerplates are such a blessing. They're essentially like having an entire team of highly-trained coders and IT professionals working on all of the boring tasks that need to be done again and again. It also means your team is free to focus on the aspects that will actually create conversions and generate income.
SaaS boilerplates also open up the marketplace to those that aren't the best at the technical aspects of building a business. The skills to create a brilliant business idea are far different than those for creating a secure, robust SQL database, after all.
Working with a SaaS boilerplate lets you have the best of all worlds - sophisticated, cutting-edge technology paired with a human touch and a deep understanding of what your customers need!
Ready to start using the Ship SaaS boilerplate?
Do you have an amazing idea for a SaaS that's going to revolutionize the business world? Cut the time to market down to virtually nothing with a SaaS boilerplate from Ship SaaS that handles all the technicalities for you. That way, you can focus on building your business and connecting with your customers.
If you're ready to find out how a SaaS boilerplate can help you launch your SaaS business in a weekend or less, get in touch today!