A few months ago, I had an idea for a SaaS product while on vacation. As soon as I got back, I made a list of to-dos and started going through it to bring my vision to life. This article outlines some of the issues I faced and the lessons I learned.

1. Figure out your monetization strategy from the beginning

Needless to say, developers enjoy writing code — and being a typical developer, I jumped straight to just that. Within a day or two, I had a super basic MVP. But there was a problem, the API I was using to power my core service tracked usage costs in fractional dollars and my payment back-end used cents (arguably a more ergonomic way to handle money and better at avoiding rounding errors).

With this discrepancy in place, I was unable to monetize my product safely. This problem was compounded by the fact that the system needed to be able to deal with cost concerns going down to fractions of a cent.

It was at this point I took a step back from the code. I consulted the API documentation for the respective services and realized that there were useful endpoints for solving my problem. I ended up reading-the-f**king manual and solving my problem with some on-the-fly cost/usage comparisons.

Had I planned my course of attack in a more granular and methodical way, I would have saved a few days of struggle due to indirection.

#startup-lessons #saas #software-development