When it comes to building SaaS, whether for B2B or B2C, you need to account for a number of fundamental building blocks that can make or break your company. In my opinion, these are the essential constituents of a SaaS product, not having them will seriously impair the ability of your users to stick to your product or service.

1. Landing page

Every company, especially SaaS businesses rely on a landing page to tell potential users about your product or service. This page is your number one tool to convince people to use the product.

Usually along with the landing page, you want to include an "About us" page and a pricing page. These give a chance to your users to spend more time learning about you and the product you're building. The more time they spend on your landing, the more likely they will convert.

2. Authentication and Signup

This is an essential feature, that allows your user to smoothly transition from the landing page to using your product. It is also a critical aspect of making a good SaaS. This should be as fast and as error-free as possible. The longer it takes to sign up the more likely people are to drop off.

It is imperative to have an extremely functional authentication, if people cannot reset their password because they just forgot them, they will very likely never return. Don't count on them contacting you for any problem resolution in this space. If you're not capable of offering a smooth authentication chances are, your product ain't that good.

3. Authorization

You want to have a clear separation between free and premium features in case you opt for a freemium model. This will greatly help you in minimising the amount of work needed to start charging for your services. When it comes to granting authorization, try to design your interactions to lead users to clearly understand the advantages of going premium. This is key to ensure you don't spend time building a product that doesn't convert.

4. Payment system

There is no business unless you have a way for people to pay for the services you offer. I strongly advice to rely on a service like Stripe. It's super fast to get started and provides you with a billing management portal that reduces your initial engineering overhead. Just make sure to make it easy for the user to be able to access the customer portal.

5. Feedback loops

I believe that the smaller the feedback loop is, the faster you can improve your product, resolve critical bugs, and make your customers happy. It's key to learn why your customers use your product, and how they use it. Knowing this can greatly help to focus on what matters the most and empowers you to facilitate your growth by word of mouth. These insights should inform how you talk about your product and market it, improving conversion rate across the funnel.

Here are two tools that can shorten your feedback loop:

• in-app direct/support chat,
• quick and easy-to-fill feedback forms that can be sent via modal pop-up or email,
• setting up a slack channel for your clients (more relevant for B2B businesses).

6. Measuring success

Analytics are essential. It's important to know what people say, but this often doesn't reflect the crude reality of things. Being able to track how your users navigate and use your product is vital to having a data-driven approach to product design and development. Knowing what is the most useed feature can greatly help to prioritise and determine the urgency of tickets in your backlog.

7. Engagement

Micro-interactions like notifications and transactional emails are essential assets to keep users engaged, reduce the knowledge gap that prevents users from navigating and get the most out of your service. Here, it's important to know where these interactions stand:

1. Are these interactions reducing the knowledge gap necessary for users to use the product?
2. Or may they be perceived as annoying to the users? Purely commercial notifications will create a negative experience.

When in doubt, make sure to get the perspective of your users, or perform tests.

8. Settings & preferences

The cons of making for a fast and smooth authentication is that you don't get a chance to customise the product to the unique needs of each user. This is when profiling and preferences come in handy! You should design meaningful prompts for the user to gain more value from your product while using it. At the same time, users should be able to easily and quickly access their settings and preferences to quickly edit them. All these actions should be reversible as it is very likely that your users will try to explore how changing the setting will change their experience.

Conclusion

Ensure to consider these vital aspects of a SaaS while designing the MVP and most importantly account for them in your backlog to be able to more accurately estimate your roadmap.