SaaS: Best Practices Series
There has been a lot of ink wasted on “Best Practices” for SaaS vendors. From my point of view, most of them have been either self-serving (use our services, platform, secret sauce) or suitable only for framed embroidery beside your desk. We’re going to waste some more….
But hopefully we will have something more significant to add 
We come to this from study, experience on all sides of the discussion, and not a few “issues” we’ve had to deal with at one time or another. We don’t have all the answers – but there is a strong group of consultants coming together who can easily fill in the gaps where we would rather step back.
We’re kicking this off with a webinar “The Business Implications of SaaS Multitancy” tomorrow – July 16, 2009 – 12pm Central Time. I will be joined by Lincoln Murphy of 16 Ventures and Rick Chapman of SaaS University. We’re going to be discussing what multitenancy is in the SaaS world and what it offers from a business point of view. If you are unable to join us – look for me to add the presentation link here following the webinar. (But – do join us! you can ask questions and comments – but only if you join!)
A lot of this push comes from the questions we get and a simple thought:
We can only be successful if our customers are successful.
So while we might build a great application for a client – if they don’t understand SaaS Marketing, Pricing, Technical Operations, Customer Support and a host of other issues and plan for dealing with them – they have a high chance of failure. That doesn’t serve us or our customers.
To deal with this we have spent the time to build a consulting framework that exposes significant holes in planning early in the process and now have a SaaS Readiness Audit™ service for helping SaaS vendors assess where they stand. We’re going to be covering different areas of best practices on the blog, in continuing webinars and in a series of SaaS Conversations we will be announcing more about next week.
We’re passionate about building a body of content and a community of expertise that can help our clients and advance the state of SaaS products in the marketplace. So we’re purposely not planning this based on our own area of work alone. We’re bringing together a group of recognized independent consultants from many areas of interest – who we know and can endorse. We will be talking about current issues that are in the news and more importantly – those issues that are critical to success for SaaS vendors.
So please – join us and add your own thoughts, questions and perspectives to the conversations!
