The Website Company’s “10 steps to SaaS” program, is the perfectly imperfect journey from zero to MVP, for ambitious entrepreneurs, start ups, aspiring SaaS owners and ideapreneurs who are struggling with the technical & creative barriers of bringing their ideas to the market.
Unlike traditional development houses who insist on working with perfectly polished and well-thought-out specification documents, we embrace your rough edges and help provide your venture with the technical kick it needs to get your MVP or version 1 over the line, so you can get your idea to the market quickly. This way, it’ll be ready and waiting to be tested by your early adopters.
Using our method and expertise, you can significantly improve your ability to scale, and therefore your chances of securing investor funding for, your SaaS venture later down the line. You’ll also have an asset with real data, real customers, and real income, to prove to potential investors that your product works, and solves a real problem.
Well, traditional development houses insist on working with perfectly refined, polished, and well-thought out specification documents that can take months and months to prepare or produce if you lack the technical expertise. This wastes valuable time that could have been better spent testing if things actually resonate in the market, with real users.
We do things differently. Instead, we will patiently work with you through 10 specially-designed stages to remove all of the technical & creative barriers that have previously stopped you from taking your venture to the market. We’ll take whiteboard ideas, and we’ll craft them into usable functionality that you can push out, test, and refine quickly with early adopters.
We do this in 2 phases.
Phase 1 takes an idea previously written on a whiteboard, or stored in your head, all the way to a spec’d out, professional, MVP specifications document. This phase is perfectly designed for any ideas which have been blocked in the past by you, or your team’s, technical or creative barriers. This is also the perfect starting point for anyone who already has a development team, but who doesn’t have the development capacity in-house to pursue an idea like this right now. If you’re already in a position where you have a specification document, you can skip most of phase 1 and go straight to stage 5.
The first stage starts by booking a call with us. After all, the first step to anything is starting.
We are happy to sign an NDA in advance of the first discussion. When you book, you’ll recieve a welcome pack which will arrive in plenty of time before the ideation & discussion call is due to start. We’ll use this to welcome you to the “Step into SaaS” program. We will also give you step by step instructions on how we will proceed going forward.
Ideation & Discussion
Once you’ve booked your ideation session, we’ll kick this call off by introducing ourselves and we’ll discuss the preliminary details about the nature & industry of the project. We use this information to quickly qualify if we’re a good fit for each other. We’ll also check that there are no obvious conflicts of interest, that it’s ethically OK, and that the project aligns with our core values.
Once we’ve established this, we’ll proceed with the main agenda of the ideation session. Here we’ll discuss:
Shortly after this call, we’ll ask you for a non-refundable deposit of £275. This is taken for two important reasons:
1. So that we can separate the silly enquiries from the serious ones straight away (you’d be surprised!).
2. You become an invested stakeholder in the project’s success, right away.
It is scientifically proven that when humans have no stakes in something, they have nothing to lose, and therefore they are less likely to value an offer or someone else’s time. The results show completely different outcomes when this was something that they were financially invested in. On top of that, if there’s one thing that’s a serial dream killer – it’s procrastinating. That’s also why our window to receive this deposit is only open for 1 week from the date of our discussion. If you miss the window, and you want to re-open it (up to a maximum of 3 weeks after our discussion) you’ll be subject to an additional £75 fee. You can only re-open this 1 week window once. Once received, we’ll move to the project to the next stage.
Timeline:
45 – 60 mins
Payment due (end of stage):
£275 non-refundable deposit
First Proposal
Once we’ve got your deposit, we will start to create an initial proposal, together in consultation with our lead architect, which takes into account all that we have discussed up to this point, including any technical requirements or limitations.
We also will also include:
If you are happy with the proposal, and you accept the associated fees, we will invite you to proceed to the next stage. You will initiate this by paying the fees for the stage 4 consultation. These consultation fees are a fixed weekly price, but the final amount is determined by the number of weeks required to finish the MVP specification document.
Timeline:
1 week
Consultation stage
A technical architect will work with you for a set number of weeks/months, dependant on the size of the project, to help write a full minimum viable product (MVP) specification document. This will be written to a professional standard which, once completed, would be suitable to be given to a team of developers. This specification document details the minimum set of functionality you’ve agreed to get your idea online, working, and into the market. No technical expertise from your side is required at any point while we are writing this document together. We just need your ideas & opinions. The whole idea of this stage is that we do the hard part of turning your whiteboard ideas into real, functional, requirements which can actually be worked on by a technical team.
The consultation stage is mainly comprised of:
We use all of the requirements during this stage to help determine the final price of the MVP. You’ll see this figure in stage 5, once the specification document is finalised.
Timeline:
Around 2-6 weeks
Payment due at start of stage:
Usually between £4-£12k, dependent on the project
Project Proposal
After we have finalised the MVP specification document, the project manager and architect will work together to produce a full project proposal for the commencement of phase 2. In a nutshell, this is just considered the development phase of the project.
This full project proposal will include:
If you accept this proposal, your project will automatically graduate into phase 2 of the program. You can also decline the proposal, and choose to exit the program at this stage, and take your specification document elsewhere. Some of our clients like to find & hire their own resources (outsourced, and thus cheaper) to complete the MVP development build. However, this option comes with a significant number of headaches, as anyone who has ever outsourced will tell you. So, if you’d prefer to rely on our expertise and familiarity with your project, and benefit from the added reliability and clear communication you get from using our vetted UK based contractors, we will be happy to assemble a knowledgable project team on your behalf who will deliver your project.
Timeline:
1-2 weeks
Payment due:
Varies. Dependent on contents of the specification document.
During the completion of phase 1, you should expect to approximately invest the following, but this varies from project to project.
Phase 2 takes your specifications document and starts to bring your project to life. Below, we walk you through the final 5 stages of the Step into SaaS journey. You’ll see that this is where things really start to get exciting.
Project Acceptance & Legal
If you’re happy with our proposal, fees, and team allocation, you’ll be ready to sign the legal stuff. This legal protection ensures that you get what you have signed up for, and ensures that we will only deliver what we have agreed. For your peace of mind, although we are not legally required to, we are fully insured for our client’s peace of mind. Upon signature of the agreement, you will need to initiate a payment in order to kick off the project and validate the agreement.
Timeline:
A couple of days – depending on how fast your solicitors are!
Team Assembly
After the signing of the agreement and after we have received your first payment, we have a certain timeframe allocated to assemble the best team & skill sets that match the project. This stage can take a little time to complete if you have complex requirements, as we only use quality contractors based in the UK who have also passed our strict quality control tests. This removes the typical guess work needed if you were to go and hire for the project yourself, as we have the expertise to know exactly what we need from each contractor, and whether they’re as talented as they say they are.
At this stage, if we haven’t been using them already, we will set you up with access for any collaboration & communication tools that we may need throughout the project.
Timeline:
1-2 weeks
Team Allocation
Once the perfect team has been allocated to your project we will communicate this to you. We will do some initial introductions so you know who is going to be working on your project. We’ll let you know when the team is ready to start on the project.
Timeline
1-2 days
Project Development
We’ll start the exciting part of actually building the project and working on bringing your idea to life.
Throughout this stage:
One important thing to note here: You’ll pay for the rest of the project throughout this development stage at any milestones which were previously agreed to by both parties in the project agreement.
Timeline:
Varies
Again, this figure varies from project to project, as no two projects are ever the same. For some guidence on pricing for phase 2, we have previously quoted anything between:
It’s incredibly important to consider working with a company who understands you to the core, your values, and your work ethic, and vice versa. Generally speaking, for a project to be a success, we require your enthusiasm, commitment & joy of seeing a project all the way through to the end. The best projects are always the ones where ultimately the whole team thrives & enjoys themeslves. So, do you and your business fit the bill?
You’ve got awesome ideas, and we’ve got the time to listen to them.
