I don’t know about you but I spend an ungodly amount every month on SaaS applications.
- $329/mo for Office Auto Pilot.
- $67/mo for Unique Article Wizard.
- $90/mo for Article Ranks
- $67/mo for Submit Your Article
- $47/mo for Free Traffic System Pro
- $65/mo for Get Response
- $67/mo for Article Marketing Automation
- $6/mo for The Best Spinner
I Donate $738 Per Month to the SaaS Industry
Even though most of these expenses are taken care of through my Marketer’s Center link building business… it still adds up to $738 per month!
But think about all these services I just listed. How did they all start out?
Some genius programmer or some smart business mind sat down at his desk and said to himself, “You know what would be really cool…” or “Hey, xxxxxxx sux bro, I bet I could make something way better…”
So this past month or so I have been really inspired by some people and companies doing big things in the SaaS world.
On a major scale, think 37 Signals and all of what they’re putting out.
On a smaller scale look at Wickedfire forums. This past year there was been a boon of SaaS stuff getting released. How about SEScout? I use them everday (even though they are often annoyingly inaccurate).
Another: Drip Feed Blasts. The first automated link solution that I know of to come out.. and they blew it up. Other similar systems like Back Link Genie and Dripable soon came out with their own stuff and now automated link building is quickly becoming a little industry on its own. Note: Look out for the case study I’m doing on these 3 within the next week or two.
I like to watch hard-working hustlers like dchuk who release tools like serpIQ, taking a bite out of the seomoz tool marketshare.
Cacoo.com is a free site you can make a handful of wireframes on.
I’m Starting Out Small
Developing your own SaaS app seems like an incredible business opportunity to me and I want in eventually…But for now I’m starting out very small just to get my feet wet.
I’m not starting a SaaS application of my own but I do need a back-end app built for my link building business.
For the last 2 months I have been looking endlessly for a decent application that can facilitate subscriptions for digital products and services. I have customers from Marketer’s Center ask me this all the time: “Can we set up a subscription for this?”
When it comes to finding an app that can do that for me, there are some out there but they fall short one way or another. Some solutions don’t even offer Paypal standard subscriptions. Credit card only subscriptions? Srs? What a conversion killer.
Something like Amember is more geared towards membership sites. I even spent $160 with their support team trying to customize my installation of Amember to meet my needs but I still wasn’t satisfied.
Eventually I decided that it would be better if I built one myself (well not me exactly, since I can’t program anything).
"Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose Discuss Their Most Top 5 Must-Read Books" - Getting Real by 37 Signals is on that list.
After reading 37 Signals’ Getting Real (which I will post a review and notes on soon) I created some wireframes using Cacoo and mind-mapped out a general idea of what I wanted the app to do.
So far, I’ve had my wireframes turned into rough HTML/CSS drafts (cost me about $75 for 10 pages and 5 hours of work) and now I’m working on some .doc program requirements.
What I am doing is really trying to make everything as clear as possible so whomever I hire can get a very clear idea of what needs to be done.
All of the advice I read online says steer clear of any developers in India or Phillippines. I have been looking @ Ruby devs in Europe and USA.
Wish me luck… or maybe even a prayer lol.
As someone who is currently working in corporate America doing UI design and working on teams taking web apps from inception all the way to production, I’ve seen quite a few things that can help.
You are doing a good thing by wireframing stuff out, and even getting the high fidelity HTML and CSS mockups. One thing you might want to do at some point is usability testing. Even if you just have a wife/sister/friend sit down with your product and try to complete a task you specify, you can get some decent feedback on how easy it is to use your site. Obviously, the more testing you do the better, and there are a few sites that do cheap usability testing, but I haven’t tried any of them out.
I personally would stick with a programmer from Europe or the US as well. While there are good programmers in India or the Phillipines, they are tough to find. WIth something as important as what you are building, I would be willing to pay a small premium to make sure I got a good developer. You’ll thank yourself in the long run, especially if you want to upgrade your site at a later point. I’ve seen plenty of times where someone had code written by a poor coder, and when they wanted changes made it was nearly impossible due to how the original coder had written it.
Best of luck on the project!
Hey Mitchell thanks for the good idea. Maybe a good place to get cheap usability testing would be Mturk? Just a thought.
Thanks for the tip on the coders. Yeah, I will definitely pay a little extra for someone good. I think penny pinching would it comes to projects like these would be a lot more costly in the long run.
One thing that is important about usability testing is to make sure that you can see what a user is doing and it’s very good if they can talk through why they are doing what they are doing. You would have to have someone on mturk do a screen capture that synchs up with voice or something like that I think.
If you’ve never read “Don’t Make Me Think” you might want to check it out. It’s a fairly quick read and he touches a lot on usability and there is a chapter on usability testing I believe. Best of luck on the project!