Tag Archives: Saas

SaaS Application Design Discussion – Part IV

In the previous post, I discussed database design for saas application. To continue design discussion for our social pie saas application, in this post, we will discuss a few more ideas about how a user and user’s company will sign up for application. This will be a user story. We are building a SAAS application. To make it more viable, this application will use the freemium and pay model.

  1. In the freemium model – Any company can join and review what reports it will be able to see and what kind of marketing strategies it can design using those reports.
    1. 5 Reports
    2. Free Marketing Strategies
    3. Up to 3 users
    4. Limited usage of twitter and Instagram APIs
  2. In pay model – If a company opts to join a pay subscription, it will be able to get more advance reports, will be able to see reports in a different format, and can also get consultation about strategies for marketing.
    1. N number of reports – Your data, your freedom
    2. Marketing Consultation
    3. KPI tracker and notification
    4. Up to N users (won’t be implemented in first version)

User Flow

Once the user lands on the home page, he can opt for either model and sign up. An automated email will be sent to the user for a demo or sign up. Upon sign up, where the user will be entering details about himself and his company. This user will be an administrator and he can add other users with custom roles. The same user can go to reports tab and click on sync data. This will get the latest data from social media and update it in the database. Every new request will compare newly fetched data with current data in the database. If the new request has brought changes, it will be updated in the database. When generating reports, this data from the database will be cached.

We will not be fetching any on-the-fly data from Twitter and Instagram. Administrator users will have an option to send reports to other people from the company. There will be an email/download option.

There are some nitty-gritty details that I have not covered in this post. But with this post, we will be starting to develop a Saas application using java and spring-boot.

 

Design and discussion of an idea for Saas Application

In this post of building an application, we discussed what is a saas application and how it can be designed and built. There are possibly a few ideas that I had in my mind or that I came across on the internet. So, I will discuss an idea for the saas application here.

One of the ideas that I have chosen, is to build a web application for small businesses so they can monitor their social media progress. A report that can give details about how the business is performing. From the outside, the whole idea seems very simple – build a report. But there are a lot of complexities involved here if we will be connecting to multiple social media.

We will be discussing the design of this idea and see if we can make progress to build a final design.

Discussion of the idea for the saas application –

  1. A small business can subscribe to this application on two models. One model will be free and others will be paid.
  2. The free model will offer a basic report about the business’ performance in social media.
  3. The paid model will offer a detailed report along with an action plan to improve marketing ratings.
  4. Part of this architecture and development, first we will build a free model only. Depending on how long it is going to take me to build the entire product, we will plan the paid model.
  5. We will use Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as the three main social media to connect to. All these three social services offer their APIs for developers.

A User flow

  1. If a small business is looking for a marketing tool as part of its social media strategy, they can subscribe to the application that I will be building herewith.
  2. A sign-up page. A user coming across this web application will have to sign up for an account to use the tool.
  3. Sign up will be unique for a business. At least for an alpha version of this tool, only a single user from a business can sign up/login. Maybe next versions or paid versions will give more flexibility to sign up or log in for multiple users from the same business.
    1. A sign-up page will ask for a business name, person’s name, contact number, email address.
    2. A person who is signing up will receive an email for confirmation with login details.
    3. Alpha version will have basic security to login and logout.
  4. Once the business has signed up, that person will access the web application to login.
  5. Alpha version will not deal with security policies at least.
  6. A user once logged into the application will see a dashboard to access the reports.
  7. There will be three reports available for the free subscription model and all three reports will give details about how a business is performing on social media. These three reports will correspond to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
  8. There will be a logout button available for the user to logout. Logout will clear all the session cookies.
  9. Each report will fetch the live data from the respective social media services. Depending on the restrictions for APIs provided by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, fetching of new data will be developed.
  10. The report will also show a graphical representation of performance.

How will this help?

What’s the value of this application for small businesses? Of course, this is the basic question. I had to think about the answer if I had to design this application. That is going to be a unique selling point (USP) of this app.

  1. The tool will provide fact-based data about how the business is doing.
  2. It will provide strategies to improve social media presence.
  3. In turn, this will give an idea to small businesses to market themselves and improve customer satisfaction.

Technology Stack

we will be using Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, Github, and AngularJS.

References

The idea for this saas application was borrowed from here.

 

Building a Saas application

This is a brainstorming post where I will jot down the ideas to build a saas application. Before we start, we have to go to basics.

What is Saas?

Software as a service (Saas) is a software delivery model. In this model, the software is served through subscription service. Saas has been popular for more than a decade now. In fact, the sales of such software have skyrocketed that building simple software has become easier. From project management to ordering healthy food, we can get any of these services through software with a subscription.

Now what do we want to build and how do we start?

Of course, this is not an easy question to answer in a single post. You have to go through trial and errors to build a viable product that people will use it. But also what and who are we targeting as an audience. There are a lot of broader areas to think about to build a product. That would make the entire process to build a software way too complex. So where do we start? The eternal question still remains.

Human psychology over the years has progressed and helped technology to build a lot of cool products. With AI has been knocking on our doors, what we build today, will be obsolete in the next ten years. Based on your own experience, what I have found, is that you look into your own daily life. When you go for grocery shopping when you talk to your friends, coworkers. The moment, you feel frustrated anything that is not in your control, that’s where you have something to build on.

I know it sounds ridiculously easy to write here in the post, but not easy when you are living life. What I am trying to point is, look at problems you or other human faces and if that problem can be solved through software, you have got a viable product idea.  At every pain point, the problem is an idea to build a product. Simple example – Elon Musk was driving on LA roads, he was caught in traffic which didn’t move for a long time. How do we improve our traffic? With increasing cars and population, this is almost going to be a nightmare in the future. He realized the problem and started a company called The Boring Company that would build underground tunnels for handling traffic.

If you are like me who works in a software company, it is easy to see through this dilemma to build a solution that can help you and other developers equally. But in a larger context, you can always go through different Saas services and hear the feedback from those services’ users. Any negative feedback is your path to build a product. Assuming we got the idea to build a Saas application, so how do we proceed further?

Post-idea discussion

Once we have a solid idea, we can think about building a minimum viable product which gives customers a chance to explore the product with minimum fuss. Less complex the product for customers to use intuitively, better will be their experiences and happier they will be to recommend your product to others.

You should work to create a minimum viable design. This will be an alpha version of the product. Getting alpha version out of the door in minimum time will give you a better idea of where to focus on scaling the product in the future. This will also save time and money.

Technology and Frameworks

Once we have the initial design of the minimum product, we can think of what technology and framework to use. What kind of infrastructure to use? Considering the less expensive options, the cloud is very popular to use to build a Saas product. This reduces the management of infrastructure while giving high availability and scalability. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all these companies offer cloud solutions to build your application. Also if you want to scale your application in the future for data-intensive, the cloud is the best option to handle all kinds of load.

For backend, there are different frameworks available based on C#, Python, or Java. Since I have worked on Java, I vouch for Spring which offers a lot of flexibility and ease to add a lot of code easily. Of course, there is a learning curve if you have never used spring before. For the database, we have two major options, one is SQL based database or NoSQL. If it is data-intensive application, NoSQL makes more sense.

On the frontend side, angularjs offers a lot of ease to build a modern user interface to interact with backend.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other factors we have not considered in this discussion especially related to the performance and health of the application. Also, we didn’t discuss any major approaches to build the application. I hope this brainstorming post will give readers an idea of a saas application that they can build.

If you have an idea of saas application and you intend to build it, let me know how it goes for you. You can subscribe to my blog.