Ended up customizing a product at early stage SaaS but is it okay?

[marcosmasliaev]

Hi. I have a problem that even running a SaaS business, I tailor my product for each client in some way. Now the number of clients is < 10.

Before I started my business, I thought there would be three pricing plans at most in most SaaS, and you could put every client into one of plans. However, since I started my business, I realized that it is impossible because even I didn't understand my business, I can't make standardized plans. Now every customer has slightly different product. I keep increasing the pricing for new contracts (keep the same for the existing clients for now), and adding a feature that was requested from a customer. For example,

• one customer asked to change a design for a reason I understand well, but another client wanted to keep using the old design
• one customer requested a new feature. I made it. I haven't let the feature available to other clients yet. This may be a chance to increase pricing but if I do not standardize, the situation does not change. It is just one of the customized plan go into another customized pplan.).
• At first, my product had a usage limit X, but I found X was too high for the cost, so I decreased the limit to Y (< X) for new clients. Also, increased the price.

Is it normal thing in SaaS? Am I missing anything or misunderstanding?

 

[jesusisking1]

@marcosmasliaev This is a common issue in the SAAS field - you can't satisfy everyone. That's why there are services for customized or even fixed versions for private deployment. Please identify your product's target audience. If your standardized product can meet the needs of most of your target users, then you should stick to selling the standardized version to avoid getting stuck in the swamp of maintaining multiple versions.

 

[marcosmasliaev]

@jesusisking1 Thanks. Also, updating terms and conditions for slightly multiple products is hard and cumbersome, having completely separate and fixed version is understandable if it is paid enough.

 

[ahcadvocacy]

@marcosmasliaev You should thoroughly analyze whether those features are nice to have or must have for your MVS.

If they are critical then of course implement them asap in your MVP.

Otherwise, save them later as add-ons and charge a few extra bucks for customizations.

 

[marcosmasliaev]

@ahcadvocacy To thoroughly analyze, you have to work with the clients, and you will have some customized plans until you figure out. My conclusion is: Customization phase is inevitable.

 

[bigfranck22]

@marcosmasliaev As your product grows, it is unrealistic to tailor the product to each customer's unique needs because you'd just have too many customers and too many feature requests to implement them all, and they might clash with each other.

The solution to the problem of many customers requesting many different features that may only be useful to a small subset of your customer base, IMO is to make your SaaS extensible. Implement a plugin system that would allow your users to write their own extensions. This will make your product's community more self-sustaining, will remove bloat by eliminating the need to show features to users even if they don't use them, and will distribute some of the effort of building and maintaining the product to the community.

The biggest benefit of this approach I think is that it will keep your customers happy while minimizing the amount of time, effort, and money that you will need to invest to build and maintain the product yourself.

Hope this helps and good luck with your SaaS!

 

[freedom7]

@marcosmasliaev Yes you need to identify the major market that use your product and put more effort on features for that group to avoid becoming a service agency that is a feature factory for everyone. In addition to That you can do what someone in the thread said. Allow the community to start building their own plugins for features you can’t build into the main product. Good job for growing. You got this!