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indiaphpexpert · 6 years ago
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dxmindstechnologies · 3 years ago
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AI Chatbot Implementors — Chatbot App Development Company in Dubai.
What is Chatbot Development?
What is a chatbot? How can it assist with help up your business? How might you build your own chatbot?
These are some normal inquiries that emerge when you contemplate conveying a chatbot to your business. As per Forbes, the chatbot market is estimated to reach $1.36 billion by 2026.
Tumblr media
In the present time, where clients accept that the experience an company gives is just about as significant as its items or administrations. That is the place where AI chatbots come in. You can basically say that bots are a basic piece of client support robotization.
Chatbots are Build for the apps empowered by AI that perform assignments for reacting to human interaction at the hour of interface. This connection held for a business objective or objective to solve client questions. They act like individual colleagues that will uphold your business by speaking with the client for 24*7 accessibility. This program created for devices to cooperate with people for reacting in text or voice way
Why Chatbots need for your business?
More businesses are carrying out AI chatbots to further develop their client support and outreach groups. Chatbots are answer requests rapidly and reliably, saving costly labor required in any event, for the little, dreary inquiries. Being one of the pioneer chatbot development companies, Bester Capital Media helps companies carry out a shrewd conversational stage that interfaces with clients through a talk stage.
We offer custom chatbots development services with explicit cycles for every customer as a feature of our Artificial Intelligence offering. Our chatbot development incorporates normal language handling, discourse acknowledgment and different advancements, equipped with verifiable client information for customized correspondence to assist clients with discovering what they’re searching for.
Get your chatbot created from the reputed chatbot development company in Dubai. We offer cost-effective and progressed AI-based programming answers for computerize connection with your clients. Now a days, ChatBots are most important in our Business it’s working Automatically. If you want to develop a Chatbot first you know about how much does cost to Develop a ChatBot.
Our Chatbot Development Services
Facebook Bot Development
Chatbot developed at DxMinds offers quality conversion about your products among the consumers. This increases the customer engagement rate in your Facebook page, which helps in exploring new verticals of marketing.
Whatsapp Bot Development
Our team of experts builds creative and innovative chatbots for WhatsApp that enables you to engage with your customers and solve their queries.
Slack Bot Development
We have the capability to develop the chatbots for the internal communications on the popular channel such as slack that enables automatic reminders and notification to the group of people.
Telegram Bot Development
Our squad of developers designs Chatbot for Telegram that helps you to deal your customers in a unique and the finest way possible.
Twilio Chatbot Development
Our well-versed team members develop the robust chatbot that allows easier communication between your business and the end users, concluded by voice commands or text.
Custom Chatbot Development
We are the top chatbot app development company in Dubai who enables Chatbot customization as per client requirement.
Mobile App Bot Development
Our developers maintain high proficiency in developing interactive mobile app bots for businesses and enterprises. This helps the app users in clarifying their queries within no time.
Website Bot Development
Our organization offers the best Chatbot for business website regardless of it s niche. This will enables customers in having an interactive communication to clarify their doubts.
Why you Choose as DxMinds as Your Technology Partner?
DxMinds Technologies Inc is a leading digital transformation and mobile app development companies in Dubai having headquarters at the USA and corporate offices in India, UAE, Peru, and Australia. The company focuses on imparting unmatched app development services to the clients, thus becoming the best app developers in Dubai. The mobile applications developed by DxMinds Technologies are scalable, reliable and highly productive. DxMinds Technologies develops innovative solutions leveraging its homegrown technologies that help clients in generating fruitful sales and revenue.
Our chatbot development services?
· We develop the Chabots which solve multiple problems.
· Economical Chatbot developers
· Our developers built effective and intelligent bots, which solves customers queries
· 24/7 customer support
· The most trusted Chatbot app development company in Dubai UAE
Advantages of Chatbots Development
· Equipped to introduce in all social media Messaging Platforms
· Continuously Available Customer Support and Maintenance
· Proactive Customer correspondence with Intelligence
· An viable approach to Increase Customer Engagement
· Controlling Customer Data and Augmenting Insights
· Better Lead Creation by communicating with clients
Factors Determining the Cost of Chatbot Development
Prior to leaping to knowing the expense, we should initially think pretty much every one of the variables that helps a chatbot improvement organization decide the expense to create a chatbot. The size of your chatbot, and the intricacy and technologies engaged with creating it, by and large decide the expense, yet there are different factors as well.
Here is theSome lists:
· In view of Industry Verticals
· In view of Business Goals
· In view of Technology
· In view of Customization
Presently let us examine these focuses exhaustively to have an unmistakable comprehension of what these components mean for the expense of Chatbot Development.
Contact us now and empower the valid deal!
We hope this blog served its purpose in letting you aware of the Mobile App Development Companyin Dubai. Hire DxMinds Technologies, the economical app development company in Dubai to develop mobile applications of your kind. To know more about reach us at +971 50 152 9161 or Visit our Website Dedicated Mobile App Developers. Reach us at [email protected]
OUR GLOBAL SERVICES LOCATIONS:·
Mobile App Development Companies in Dubai·
Mobile App Development Companies in Saudi Arabia·
Mobile App Development Companies in Kuwait·
Mobile App Development Companies in Oman Muscat·
Mobile App Development Companies in Abu Dhabi
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businessliveme · 5 years ago
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Twilio Rises on Communications Software Demand Amid Pandemic
(Bloomberg) — Twilio Inc. projected rising sales for the second quarter, signaling stronger demand for communications software amid the coronavirus pandemic. Shares climbed about 25%.
Revenue will increase as much as 35% to $370 million in the period, the San Francisco-based company said Wednesday in a statement. Analysts, on average, projected sales of $334 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The company expects a loss, excluding some items, of 8 cents to 11 cents per share, which also is better than analysts had estimated.
Twilio Chief Executive Officer Jeff Lawson has assembled a broad set of cloud-based capabilities that help companies embed communications systems in their apps and on their web pages. The company last year completed the largest acquisition in its history, buying SendGrid, which competes with Salesforce.com Inc. and others in helping clients send marketing emails.
With people forced to stay at home during the Covid-19 pandemic, companies have reached out to customers through digital channels, boosting demand for Twilio’s tools. The software maker said in April that Epic Systems Corp., one of the largest U.S. medical records companies, would build a new telehealth service to connect health care providers and patients using Twilio’s videoconferencing product.
“Our platform provides three things the world needs right now: digital engagement, software agility and cloud scale,” Lawson said in the statement.
Shares jumped to a high of $154.28 in extended trading after closing at $122.40 in New York. The stock has climbed about 25% this year.
The company has seen waning demand from the travel, hospitality and ride-sharing industries, which have been hit hard during the pandemic, but health care, education and crisis response organizations have picked up the slack, Chief Financial Officer Khozema Shipchandler said in an interview.
Twilio withdrew its full-year guidance because of uncertainty surrounding the outbreak, but said first-quarter sales surged 57% from a year earlier to $364.9 million.
Twilio has spent rapidly to expand its business, including overseas. Shipchandler said the company has continued to hire people at the same pace during the pandemic, including to fill out a new research-and-development team based in India.
“If we can successfully invest in this cycle, we can emerge from this pandemic stronger than ever,” Shipchandler said.
The post Twilio Rises on Communications Software Demand Amid Pandemic appeared first on Businessliveme.com.
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samiam03x · 8 years ago
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Here’s How I Built and Launched a SaaS Company For Less Than $40k
About 6 months ago I decided that I was going to build a SaaS company from scratch. I had recently sold my company and found myself in discussions with a number of startups around making angel investments. This didn’t get me too excited so I wanted to see if I could build and launch a SaaS company for the same amount of money that I would have otherwise angel invested into other companies.
My thought process was that if I could pull it off then I would own 100% of the company, and have full control of my own destiny, rather than simply cutting a check and owning less than 1% of the company.
My background is primarily concentrated on small businesses, selling products like leads and back office software. In the past 6 years I’ve had thousands of conversations with small businesses discussing everything from how they operate to where they are spending money on marketing. Through these conversations I realized that a lot of businesses are leaving money on the table by not knowing where their phone calls are being generated from, not answering the phone all the time, and not knowing how to close a prospect once they are on the phone with them.
It was through these conversations and the success of the Twilio IPO that I decided I was going to build call-tracking software.
Now that we have launched and have paying customers, I’m sharing the tactics I used to build and launch a SaaS company, along with the documentation that I created during this process including email outreach scripts, user stories, product requirements doc, and other tools I used to make it happen.
Step 1: Finding a Designer
In my opinion, design and user experience (UX) is one of the most important aspects of SaaS. Good design will go a long way to not only convert customers but also help them engage with your product and ultimately retain.
To find a designer I used Dribbble, a community of designers that showcase their work. There are other similar sites out there like Carbonmade or Behance but I’ve used Dribbble in the past and felt more comfortable there.
You must be a paid member of the community to send a message to designers, which costs $20 for the year. After coughing up the twenty bucks (obviously worth it), I took about 6 hours one day and searched for designs that I loved.
I would search for things like “b2b dashboard”, “saas dashboard”, etc:
After browsing through hundreds of designers and portfolios, I narrowed down a list of my top 10. Since not all of them would be available to take on a new project, I decided I needed to contact them all in hopes that at least a couple of them would be able to work with me, at which point I would then select my favorite.
I sent them all this entire message:
Of the 10 messages sent, I received 8 replies. One of the designers was not available for work (but replied anyway.. boom!) and 7 of them invited me to an exploratory call.
Here’s the funnel for my designer search:
The designer that I ended up choosing does amazing work, has relevant experience, and totally understood what I was doing. I personally wanted someone who I could lean on as a thought partner rather than them just blindly doing everything I told them. From the initial phone and Skype conversations, I could tell that the designer I chose was that person.
After thoroughly discussing requirements (more on that in a little), we landed on a fixed price for the project to be paid out at the completion of each deliverable.
Here is a cleaner view of the design deliverables:
I didn’t intend on spending this much money on design – however, it’s my assumption that good design and a beautiful user experience will pay off exponentially in the long run through higher customer lifetime value due to increased retention.
Step 2: Create Product Requirements
I don’t like the phrase “product requirements”. It sounds very corporate and heavy. When I refer to product requirements, I’m referring to all the various documents that help tell the story about what the product is, how it works, and who will be using it.
First, I created a very basic product design overview document (here) and product features document (here). These were created to provide both a high level overview of the product and very specific features that the product must have in order to provide value.
Next, I typed up a real life example of why the product is needed and the problem that it’s solving.
Finally, I created another document that went over the pain points that we are solving for and the solution that we’re offering to those pain points.
My designer recommended that we create user stories as well. As Mountain Goat Software explains, user stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.
Ours ended up looking like this:
(see the document here)
We also filled out a worksheet based on the Hook model, the four step process companies use to build consumer habits. If you aren’t familiar, Hooked is an amazing book about how to build habit-forming products.
(Download the worksheet here)
Summary
During this phase we created the following documents to help us define our product requirements:
Product Design Overview
Product Features
Real life use case story
Pain Points & Solutions
User Stories
Hook Model worksheet
Now that we had thoroughly defined the product, it was time to move on to the agreed upon deliverables from the designer.
Step 3: Design Deliverables
My designer was very transparent and collaborative during the design phase. We would be in constant contact and talked on Skype throughout the day.
He would sometimes send me previews of wireframes and designs in Skype but would always throw them in a program like InVision afterwards to make sure everything is easily accessible.
The design process was very straightforward. We would spend a lot of time on wireframes because that’s where the customer experience and flow gets hashed out. This took quite a bit of time and a lot of back and forth thinking through various scenarios. After we nailed the wireframes, we moved on to design. My designer would send some designs along for feedback and I would comment on them until we landed on something we both agreed on.
During the design phase we used a number of tools for various functions like providing a preview of the current designs (InVision) to submitting an invoice for the completion of each deliverable milestone (FreshBooks).
Here’s a quick list of the tools we used:
Step 4: Finding a Developer
The next step to building our SaaS product was, well, building it. Similar to how I searched for a designer on Dribbble, it was now time to search for a developer.
Before I began my search I needed to decide on a few things. First, I needed to decide if I was okay with using an offshore developer. Next, I needed to decide on the level of experience required. Finally, I needed to decide if I wanted a freelance developer or one that was working inside of a company.
While these aren’t exact, the ballpark hourly rates for different experience levels are below:
Due to cost I decided I wanted to hire a senior developer in India who was working inside of a company (not freelancing). That way I got access to project managers who would be holding them accountable.
To find the developer I was looking for I used Upwork, a website that connects clients with freelancers. I created a job post and detailed out what I was looking for.
I received 39 applications to my job post and interviewed 6 people. To decide who I would interview, I looked very carefully at 3 things:
Reviews
Job Success Score
Number of Verified Hours
The developer I ended up going with had over 9,000 hours completed through Upwork and 100% job success score, meaning that 100% of his jobs resulted in a great client experience. These are numbers that the freelancers cannot manipulate so they are taken very seriously. In addition to our conversations, these things made me I feel comfortable hiring him.
Step 5: Building The Product
Building a software product from the ground up is challenging. There are a number of things to do that include setting up the project architecture, creating the database with schemas, tables, and triggers, setting up webhooks for API calls, creating login credential validation, and so much more.
My developer gave me a rough estimate on the number of hours it would take to complete these various stages and updates me every 4 weeks on the status of our milestones.
He also sends me daily email updates so I know exactly what he’s working on each day.
We are also in constant communication at nearly all hours of the day. My developer is also a thought partner – he is coming up with scenarios that I’m not thinking of and providing very valuable product recommendations. This is incredibly valuable.
After about 6 months and over 850 hours, we were finally able to get a product shipped.
Here’s a snapshot of the developer’s hours as of the time of this posting:
Step 6: Marketing & Sales
Now that I had a working product, it was time to begin selling it. Now of course there’s a ton of content out there that goes over SaaS marketing and sales. I’m not going to dive into it too deep but rather give you an overview of what I did to begin selling my product.
To start, I registered a domain using GoDaddy, used WPEngine to host my site, setup branded emails with Google Apps, and then threw up a WordPress landing page.
To get my WordPress landing page designed and implemented, I posted a job on Upwork.
I paid $150 for this to be done and it took them about 2 days. The guy I used for this used the WordPress theme Divi, which is a powerful theme that makes it easy to build WordPress sites with their visual builder (so you don’t need to know how to code).
After the landing page was up, I ran some basic Facebook ads to drive traffic to the site. From there I would call every single person that submitted their information through my form.
I created various phone scripts to document what was working and what wasn’t. I was able to get a couple paying customers using this method. I would create their account on the backend and charge them manually in Stripe. Then I would send them the URL of our software application along with their username and password.
My first customers loved that they were early adopters and able to contribute valuable feedback that would shape the product in the future.
Here’s a cool email I got from one of my first few customers:
Conclusion
All in all, I spent just under $40k building my SaaS product:
I’m confident that if you use this approach you can also build a SaaS product for under $40k. This is a great alternative to raising a ton of money and diluting yourself and your future employees.
It isn’t going to be easy. It will require a lot of focus and effort. But if are able to follow this outline and find a talented developer and designer, you will be able to get your SaaS company off the ground. You don’t need a ton of cash or to raise venture capital to do this.
I hope this post inspires you to build and launch a SaaS company that people love.
About the Author: Ryan Shank is the founder of PhoneWagon, beautiful call tracking software that helps businesses improve their marketing spend by using unique local phone numbers on each of their campaigns. Previously, Ryan was the COO at mHelpDesk which was acquired by HomeAdvisor in 2014. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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marie85marketing · 8 years ago
Text
Here’s How I Built and Launched a SaaS Company For Less Than $40k
About 6 months ago I decided that I was going to build a SaaS company from scratch. I had recently sold my company and found myself in discussions with a number of startups around making angel investments. This didn’t get me too excited so I wanted to see if I could build and launch a SaaS company for the same amount of money that I would have otherwise angel invested into other companies.
My thought process was that if I could pull it off then I would own 100% of the company, and have full control of my own destiny, rather than simply cutting a check and owning less than 1% of the company.
My background is primarily concentrated on small businesses, selling products like leads and back office software. In the past 6 years I’ve had thousands of conversations with small businesses discussing everything from how they operate to where they are spending money on marketing. Through these conversations I realized that a lot of businesses are leaving money on the table by not knowing where their phone calls are being generated from, not answering the phone all the time, and not knowing how to close a prospect once they are on the phone with them.
It was through these conversations and the success of the Twilio IPO that I decided I was going to build call-tracking software.
Now that we have launched and have paying customers, I’m sharing the tactics I used to build and launch a SaaS company, along with the documentation that I created during this process including email outreach scripts, user stories, product requirements doc, and other tools I used to make it happen.
Step 1: Finding a Designer
In my opinion, design and user experience (UX) is one of the most important aspects of SaaS. Good design will go a long way to not only convert customers but also help them engage with your product and ultimately retain.
To find a designer I used Dribbble, a community of designers that showcase their work. There are other similar sites out there like Carbonmade or Behance but I’ve used Dribbble in the past and felt more comfortable there.
You must be a paid member of the community to send a message to designers, which costs $20 for the year. After coughing up the twenty bucks (obviously worth it), I took about 6 hours one day and searched for designs that I loved.
I would search for things like “b2b dashboard”, “saas dashboard”, etc:
After browsing through hundreds of designers and portfolios, I narrowed down a list of my top 10. Since not all of them would be available to take on a new project, I decided I needed to contact them all in hopes that at least a couple of them would be able to work with me, at which point I would then select my favorite.
I sent them all this entire message:
Of the 10 messages sent, I received 8 replies. One of the designers was not available for work (but replied anyway.. boom!) and 7 of them invited me to an exploratory call.
Here’s the funnel for my designer search:
The designer that I ended up choosing does amazing work, has relevant experience, and totally understood what I was doing. I personally wanted someone who I could lean on as a thought partner rather than them just blindly doing everything I told them. From the initial phone and Skype conversations, I could tell that the designer I chose was that person.
After thoroughly discussing requirements (more on that in a little), we landed on a fixed price for the project to be paid out at the completion of each deliverable.
Here is a cleaner view of the design deliverables:
I didn’t intend on spending this much money on design – however, it’s my assumption that good design and a beautiful user experience will pay off exponentially in the long run through higher customer lifetime value due to increased retention.
Step 2: Create Product Requirements
I don’t like the phrase “product requirements”. It sounds very corporate and heavy. When I refer to product requirements, I’m referring to all the various documents that help tell the story about what the product is, how it works, and who will be using it.
First, I created a very basic product design overview document (here) and product features document (here). These were created to provide both a high level overview of the product and very specific features that the product must have in order to provide value.
Next, I typed up a real life example of why the product is needed and the problem that it’s solving.
Finally, I created another document that went over the pain points that we are solving for and the solution that we’re offering to those pain points.
My designer recommended that we create user stories as well. As Mountain Goat Software explains, user stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.
Ours ended up looking like this:
(see the document here)
We also filled out a worksheet based on the Hook model, the four step process companies use to build consumer habits. If you aren’t familiar, Hooked is an amazing book about how to build habit-forming products.
(Download the worksheet here)
Summary
During this phase we created the following documents to help us define our product requirements:
Product Design Overview
Product Features
Real life use case story
Pain Points & Solutions
User Stories
Hook Model worksheet
Now that we had thoroughly defined the product, it was time to move on to the agreed upon deliverables from the designer.
Step 3: Design Deliverables
My designer was very transparent and collaborative during the design phase. We would be in constant contact and talked on Skype throughout the day.
He would sometimes send me previews of wireframes and designs in Skype but would always throw them in a program like InVision afterwards to make sure everything is easily accessible.
The design process was very straightforward. We would spend a lot of time on wireframes because that’s where the customer experience and flow gets hashed out. This took quite a bit of time and a lot of back and forth thinking through various scenarios. After we nailed the wireframes, we moved on to design. My designer would send some designs along for feedback and I would comment on them until we landed on something we both agreed on.
During the design phase we used a number of tools for various functions like providing a preview of the current designs (InVision) to submitting an invoice for the completion of each deliverable milestone (FreshBooks).
Here’s a quick list of the tools we used:
Step 4: Finding a Developer
The next step to building our SaaS product was, well, building it. Similar to how I searched for a designer on Dribbble, it was now time to search for a developer.
Before I began my search I needed to decide on a few things. First, I needed to decide if I was okay with using an offshore developer. Next, I needed to decide on the level of experience required. Finally, I needed to decide if I wanted a freelance developer or one that was working inside of a company.
While these aren’t exact, the ballpark hourly rates for different experience levels are below:
Due to cost I decided I wanted to hire a senior developer in India who was working inside of a company (not freelancing). That way I got access to project managers who would be holding them accountable.
To find the developer I was looking for I used Upwork, a website that connects clients with freelancers. I created a job post and detailed out what I was looking for.
I received 39 applications to my job post and interviewed 6 people. To decide who I would interview, I looked very carefully at 3 things:
Reviews
Job Success Score
Number of Verified Hours
The developer I ended up going with had over 9,000 hours completed through Upwork and 100% job success score, meaning that 100% of his jobs resulted in a great client experience. These are numbers that the freelancers cannot manipulate so they are taken very seriously. In addition to our conversations, these things made me I feel comfortable hiring him.
Step 5: Building The Product
Building a software product from the ground up is challenging. There are a number of things to do that include setting up the project architecture, creating the database with schemas, tables, and triggers, setting up webhooks for API calls, creating login credential validation, and so much more.
My developer gave me a rough estimate on the number of hours it would take to complete these various stages and updates me every 4 weeks on the status of our milestones.
He also sends me daily email updates so I know exactly what he’s working on each day.
We are also in constant communication at nearly all hours of the day. My developer is also a thought partner – he is coming up with scenarios that I’m not thinking of and providing very valuable product recommendations. This is incredibly valuable.
After about 6 months and over 850 hours, we were finally able to get a product shipped.
Here’s a snapshot of the developer’s hours as of the time of this posting:
Step 6: Marketing & Sales
Now that I had a working product, it was time to begin selling it. Now of course there’s a ton of content out there that goes over SaaS marketing and sales. I’m not going to dive into it too deep but rather give you an overview of what I did to begin selling my product.
To start, I registered a domain using GoDaddy, used WPEngine to host my site, setup branded emails with Google Apps, and then threw up a WordPress landing page.
To get my WordPress landing page designed and implemented, I posted a job on Upwork.
I paid $150 for this to be done and it took them about 2 days. The guy I used for this used the WordPress theme Divi, which is a powerful theme that makes it easy to build WordPress sites with their visual builder (so you don’t need to know how to code).
After the landing page was up, I ran some basic Facebook ads to drive traffic to the site. From there I would call every single person that submitted their information through my form.
I created various phone scripts to document what was working and what wasn’t. I was able to get a couple paying customers using this method. I would create their account on the backend and charge them manually in Stripe. Then I would send them the URL of our software application along with their username and password.
My first customers loved that they were early adopters and able to contribute valuable feedback that would shape the product in the future.
Here’s a cool email I got from one of my first few customers:
Conclusion
All in all, I spent just under $40k building my SaaS product:
I’m confident that if you use this approach you can also build a SaaS product for under $40k. This is a great alternative to raising a ton of money and diluting yourself and your future employees.
It isn’t going to be easy. It will require a lot of focus and effort. But if are able to follow this outline and find a talented developer and designer, you will be able to get your SaaS company off the ground. You don’t need a ton of cash or to raise venture capital to do this.
I hope this post inspires you to build and launch a SaaS company that people love.
About the Author: Ryan Shank is the founder of PhoneWagon, beautiful call tracking software that helps businesses improve their marketing spend by using unique local phone numbers on each of their campaigns. Previously, Ryan was the COO at mHelpDesk which was acquired by HomeAdvisor in 2014. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
0 notes
dianesaddler · 8 years ago
Text
Here’s How I Built And Launched A SaaS Company For Less Than $40k
About 6 months ago I decided that I was going to build a SaaS company from scratch. I had recently sold my company and found myself in discussions with a number of startups around making angel investments. This didn’t get me too excited so I wanted to see if I could build and launch a SaaS company for the same amount of money that I would have otherwise angel invested into other companies.
My thought process was that if I could pull it off then I would own 100% of the company, and have full control of my own destiny, rather than simply cutting a check and owning less than 1% of the company.
My background is primarily concentrated on small businesses, selling products like leads and back office software. In the past 6 years I’ve had thousands of conversations with small businesses discussing everything from how they operate to where they are spending money on marketing. Through these conversations I realized that a lot of businesses are leaving money on the table by not knowing where their phone calls are being generated from, not answering the phone all the time, and not knowing how to close a prospect once they are on the phone with them.
It was through these conversations and the success of the Twilio IPO that I decided I was going to build call tracking software.
Now that we have launched and have paying customers, I’m sharing the tactics I used to build and launch a SaaS company, along with the documentation that I created during this process including email outreach scripts, user stories, product requirements doc, and other tools I used to make it happen.
Step 1: Finding a Designer
In my opinion, design and user experience (UX) is one of the most important aspects of SaaS. Good design will go a long way to not only convert customers but help them engage with your product and ultimately retain.
To find a designer I used Dribbble, a community of designers that showcase their work. There are other similar sites out there like Carbonmade or Behance but I’ve used Dribbble in the past and felt more comfortable there.
You must be a paid member of the community to send a message to designers, which costs $20 for the year. After coughing up the twenty bucks (obviously worth it), I took about 6 hours one day and searched for designs that I loved.
I would search for things like “b2b dashboard”, “saas dashboard”, etc:
After browsing through hundreds of designers and portfolios, I narrowed down a list of my top 10. Since not all of them would be available to take on a new project, I decided I needed to contact them all in hopes that at least a couple of them would be able to work with me, at which point I would then select my favorite.
I sent them all this message:
Of the 10 messages sent, I received 8 replies. One of the designers was not available for work (but replied anyway.. boom!) and 7 of them invited me to an exploratory call.
Here’s the funnel for my designer search:
The designer that I ended up choosing does amazing work, has relevant experience, and totally understood what I was doing. I personally wanted someone who I could lean on as a thought partner rather than them just blindly doing everything I told them. From the initial phone and Skype conversations, I could tell that the designer I chose was that person.
After thoroughly discussing requirements (more on that in a little), we landed on a fixed price for the project to be paid out at the completion of each deliverable.
Here is a cleaner view of the design deliverables:
I didn’t intend on spending this much money on design – however, it’s my assumption that good design and a beautiful user experience will pay off exponentially in the long run through higher customer lifetime value due to increased retention.
Step 2: Create Product Requirements
I don’t like the phrase “product requirements”. It sounds very corporate and heavy. When I refer to product requirements, I’m referring to all the various documents that help tell the story about what the product is, how it works, and who will be using it.
First, I created a very basic product design overview document (here) and product features document (here). These were created to provide both a high level overview of the product and very specific features that the product must have in order to provide value.
Next, I typed up a real life example of why the product is needed and the problem that it’s solving.
Finally, I created another document that went over the pain points that we are solving for and the solution that we’re offering to those pain points.
My designer recommended that we create user stories as well. As Mountain Goat Software explains, user stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.
Ours ended up looking like this:
(see the document here)
We also filled out a worksheet based on the Hook model, the four step process companies use to build consumer habits. If you aren’t familiar, Hooked is an amazing book about how to build habit-forming products.
(Download the worksheet here)
Summary
During this phase we created the following documents to help us define our product requirements:
Product Design Overview
Product Features
Real life use case story
Pain Points & Solutions
User Stories
Hook Model worksheet
Now that we had thoroughly defined the product, it was time to move on to the agreed upon deliverables from the designer.
Step 3: Design Deliverables
My designer was very transparent and collaborative during the design phase. We would be in constant contact and talked on Skype throughout the day.
He would sometimes send me previews of wireframes and designs in Skype but would always throw them in a program like InVision afterwards to make sure everything is easily accessible.
The design process was very straightforward. We would spend a lot of time on wireframes because that’s where the customer experience and flow gets hashed out. This took quite a bit of time and a lot of back and forth thinking through various scenarios. After we nailed the wireframes, we moved on to design. My designer would send some designs along for feedback and I would comment on them until we landed on something we both agreed on.
During the design phase we used a number of tools for various functions like providing a preview of the current designs (InVision) to submitting an invoice for the completion of each deliverable milestone (Freshbooks).
Here’s a quick list of the tools we used:
Step 4: Finding a Developer
The next step to building our SaaS product was, well, building it. Similar to how I searched for a designer on Dribbble, it was now time to search for a developer.
Before I began my search I needed to decide on a few things. First, I needed to decide if I was okay with using an offshore developer. Next, I needed to decide on the level of experience required. Finally, I needed to decide if I wanted a freelance developer or one that was working inside of a company.
While these aren’t exact, the ballpark hourly rates for different experience levels are below:
Due to cost I decided I wanted to hire a senior developer in India who was working inside of a company (not freelancing). That way I got access to project managers who would be holding them accountable.
To find the developer I was looking for I used Upwork, a website that connects clients with freelancers. I created a job post and detailed out what I was looking for.
I received 39 applications to my job post and interviewed 6 people. To decide who I would interview, I looked very carefully at 3 things:
Reviews
Job Success Score
Number of Verified Hours
The developer I ended up going with had over 9,000 hours completed through Upwork and 100% job success score, meaning that 100% of his jobs resulted in a great client experience. These are numbers that the freelancers cannot manipulate so they are taken very seriously. In addition to our conversations, these things made me I feel comfortable hiring him.
Step 5: Building The Product
Building a software product from the ground up is challenging. There are a number of things to do that include setting up the project architecture, creating the database with schemas, tables, and triggers, setting up webhooks for API calls, creating login credential validation, and so much more.
My developer gave me a rough estimate on the number of hours it would take to complete these various stages and updates me every 4 weeks on the status of our milestones.
He also sends me daily email updates so I know exactly what he’s working on each day.
We are also in constant communication at nearly all hours of the day. My developer is also a thought partner – he is coming up with scenarios that I’m not thinking of and providing very valuable product recommendations. This is incredibly valuable.
After about 6 months and over 850 hours, we were finally able to get a product shipped.
Here’s a snapshot of the developer’s hours as of the time of this posting:
Step 6: Marketing & Sales
Now that I had a working product, it was time to begin selling it. Now of course there’s a ton of content out there that goes over SaaS marketing and sales. I’m not going to dive into it too deep but rather give you an overview of what I did to begin selling my product.
To start, I registered a domain using GoDaddy, used WPEngine to host my site, setup branded emails with Google Apps, and then threw up a WordPress landing page.
To get my WordPress landing page designed and implemented, I posted a job on Upwork.
I paid $150 for this to be done and it took them about 2 days. The guy I used for this used the WordPress theme Divi, which is a powerful theme that makes it easy to build wordpress sites with their visual builder (so you don’t need to know how to code).
After the landing page was up, I ran some basic Facebook ads to drive traffic to the site. From there I would call every single person that submitted their information through my form.
I created various phone scripts to document what was working and what wasn’t. I was able to get a couple paying customers using this method. I would create their account on the backend and charge them manually in Stripe. Then I would send them the URL of our software application along with their username and password.
My first customers loved that they were early adopters and able to contribute valuable feedback that would shape the product in the future.
Here’s a cool email I got from one of my first few customers:
Conclusion
All in all, I spent just under $40k building my SaaS product:
I’m confident that if you use this approach you can also build a SaaS product for under $40k. This is a great alternative to raising a ton of money and diluting yourself and your future employees.
It isn’t going to be easy. It will require a lot of focus and effort. But if are able to follow this outline and find a talented developer and designer, you will be able to get your SaaS company off the ground. You don’t need a ton of cash or to raise venture capital to do this.
I hope this post inspires you to build and launch a SaaS company that people love.
About the Author: Ryan Shank is the founder of PhoneWagon, beautiful call tracking software that helps businesses improve their marketing spend by using unique local phone numbers on each of their campaigns. Previously, Ryan was the COO at mHelpDesk which was acquired by HomeAdvisor in 2014. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Here’s How I Built And Launched A SaaS Company For Less Than $40k posted first on Kissmetrics Blog
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ericsburden-blog · 8 years ago
Text
Here’s How I Built And Launched A SaaS Company For Less Than $40k
About 6 months ago I decided that I was going to build a SaaS company from scratch. I had recently sold my company and found myself in discussions with a number of startups around making angel investments. This didn’t get me too excited so I wanted to see if I could build and launch a SaaS company for the same amount of money that I would have otherwise angel invested into other companies.
My thought process was that if I could pull it off then I would own 100% of the company, and have full control of my own destiny, rather than simply cutting a check and owning less than 1% of the company.
My background is primarily concentrated on small businesses, selling products like leads and back office software. In the past 6 years I’ve had thousands of conversations with small businesses discussing everything from how they operate to where they are spending money on marketing. Through these conversations I realized that a lot of businesses are leaving money on the table by not knowing where their phone calls are being generated from, not answering the phone all the time, and not knowing how to close a prospect once they are on the phone with them.
It was through these conversations and the success of the Twilio IPO that I decided I was going to build call tracking software.
Now that we have launched and have paying customers, I’m sharing the tactics I used to build and launch a SaaS company, along with the documentation that I created during this process including email outreach scripts, user stories, product requirements doc, and other tools I used to make it happen.
Step 1: Finding a Designer
In my opinion, design and user experience (UX) is one of the most important aspects of SaaS. Good design will go a long way to not only convert customers but help them engage with your product and ultimately retain.
To find a designer I used Dribbble, a community of designers that showcase their work. There are other similar sites out there like Carbonmade or Behance but I’ve used Dribbble in the past and felt more comfortable there.
You must be a paid member of the community to send a message to designers, which costs $20 for the year. After coughing up the twenty bucks (obviously worth it), I took about 6 hours one day and searched for designs that I loved.
I would search for things like “b2b dashboard”, “saas dashboard”, etc:
After browsing through hundreds of designers and portfolios, I narrowed down a list of my top 10. Since not all of them would be available to take on a new project, I decided I needed to contact them all in hopes that at least a couple of them would be able to work with me, at which point I would then select my favorite.
I sent them all this message:
Of the 10 messages sent, I received 8 replies. One of the designers was not available for work (but replied anyway.. boom!) and 7 of them invited me to an exploratory call.
Here’s the funnel for my designer search:
The designer that I ended up choosing does amazing work, has relevant experience, and totally understood what I was doing. I personally wanted someone who I could lean on as a thought partner rather than them just blindly doing everything I told them. From the initial phone and Skype conversations, I could tell that the designer I chose was that person.
After thoroughly discussing requirements (more on that in a little), we landed on a fixed price for the project to be paid out at the completion of each deliverable.
Here is a cleaner view of the design deliverables:
I didn’t intend on spending this much money on design – however, it’s my assumption that good design and a beautiful user experience will pay off exponentially in the long run through higher customer lifetime value due to increased retention.
Step 2: Create Product Requirements
I don’t like the phrase “product requirements”. It sounds very corporate and heavy. When I refer to product requirements, I’m referring to all the various documents that help tell the story about what the product is, how it works, and who will be using it.
First, I created a very basic product design overview document (here) and product features document (here). These were created to provide both a high level overview of the product and very specific features that the product must have in order to provide value.
Next, I typed up a real life example of why the product is needed and the problem that it’s solving.
Finally, I created another document that went over the pain points that we are solving for and the solution that we’re offering to those pain points.
My designer recommended that we create user stories as well. As Mountain Goat Software explains, user stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality.
Ours ended up looking like this:
(see the document here)
We also filled out a worksheet based on the Hook model, the four step process companies use to build consumer habits. If you aren’t familiar, Hooked is an amazing book about how to build habit-forming products.
(Download the worksheet here)
Summary
During this phase we created the following documents to help us define our product requirements:
Product Design Overview
Product Features
Real life use case story
Pain Points & Solutions
User Stories
Hook Model worksheet
Now that we had thoroughly defined the product, it was time to move on to the agreed upon deliverables from the designer.
Step 3: Design Deliverables
My designer was very transparent and collaborative during the design phase. We would be in constant contact and talked on Skype throughout the day.
He would sometimes send me previews of wireframes and designs in Skype but would always throw them in a program like InVision afterwards to make sure everything is easily accessible.
The design process was very straightforward. We would spend a lot of time on wireframes because that’s where the customer experience and flow gets hashed out. This took quite a bit of time and a lot of back and forth thinking through various scenarios. After we nailed the wireframes, we moved on to design. My designer would send some designs along for feedback and I would comment on them until we landed on something we both agreed on.
During the design phase we used a number of tools for various functions like providing a preview of the current designs (InVision) to submitting an invoice for the completion of each deliverable milestone (Freshbooks).
Here’s a quick list of the tools we used:
Step 4: Finding a Developer
The next step to building our SaaS product was, well, building it. Similar to how I searched for a designer on Dribbble, it was now time to search for a developer.
Before I began my search I needed to decide on a few things. First, I needed to decide if I was okay with using an offshore developer. Next, I needed to decide on the level of experience required. Finally, I needed to decide if I wanted a freelance developer or one that was working inside of a company.
While these aren’t exact, the ballpark hourly rates for different experience levels are below:
Due to cost I decided I wanted to hire a senior developer in India who was working inside of a company (not freelancing). That way I got access to project managers who would be holding them accountable.
To find the developer I was looking for I used Upwork, a website that connects clients with freelancers. I created a job post and detailed out what I was looking for.
I received 39 applications to my job post and interviewed 6 people. To decide who I would interview, I looked very carefully at 3 things:
Reviews
Job Success Score
Number of Verified Hours
The developer I ended up going with had over 9,000 hours completed through Upwork and 100% job success score, meaning that 100% of his jobs resulted in a great client experience. These are numbers that the freelancers cannot manipulate so they are taken very seriously. In addition to our conversations, these things made me I feel comfortable hiring him.
Step 5: Building The Product
Building a software product from the ground up is challenging. There are a number of things to do that include setting up the project architecture, creating the database with schemas, tables, and triggers, setting up webhooks for API calls, creating login credential validation, and so much more.
My developer gave me a rough estimate on the number of hours it would take to complete these various stages and updates me every 4 weeks on the status of our milestones.
He also sends me daily email updates so I know exactly what he’s working on each day.
We are also in constant communication at nearly all hours of the day. My developer is also a thought partner – he is coming up with scenarios that I’m not thinking of and providing very valuable product recommendations. This is incredibly valuable.
After about 6 months and over 850 hours, we were finally able to get a product shipped.
Here’s a snapshot of the developer’s hours as of the time of this posting:
Step 6: Marketing & Sales
Now that I had a working product, it was time to begin selling it. Now of course there’s a ton of content out there that goes over SaaS marketing and sales. I’m not going to dive into it too deep but rather give you an overview of what I did to begin selling my product.
To start, I registered a domain using GoDaddy, used WPEngine to host my site, setup branded emails with Google Apps, and then threw up a WordPress landing page.
To get my WordPress landing page designed and implemented, I posted a job on Upwork.
I paid $150 for this to be done and it took them about 2 days. The guy I used for this used the WordPress theme Divi, which is a powerful theme that makes it easy to build wordpress sites with their visual builder (so you don’t need to know how to code).
After the landing page was up, I ran some basic Facebook ads to drive traffic to the site. From there I would call every single person that submitted their information through my form.
I created various phone scripts to document what was working and what wasn’t. I was able to get a couple paying customers using this method. I would create their account on the backend and charge them manually in Stripe. Then I would send them the URL of our software application along with their username and password.
My first customers loved that they were early adopters and able to contribute valuable feedback that would shape the product in the future.
Here’s a cool email I got from one of my first few customers:
Conclusion
All in all, I spent just under $40k building my SaaS product:
I’m confident that if you use this approach you can also build a SaaS product for under $40k. This is a great alternative to raising a ton of money and diluting yourself and your future employees.
It isn’t going to be easy. It will require a lot of focus and effort. But if are able to follow this outline and find a talented developer and designer, you will be able to get your SaaS company off the ground. You don’t need a ton of cash or to raise venture capital to do this.
I hope this post inspires you to build and launch a SaaS company that people love.
About the Author: Ryan Shank is the founder of PhoneWagon, beautiful call tracking software that helps businesses improve their marketing spend by using unique local phone numbers on each of their campaigns. Previously, Ryan was the COO at mHelpDesk which was acquired by HomeAdvisor in 2014. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Here’s How I Built And Launched A SaaS Company For Less Than $40k
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