When it comes to smart growth for your SaaS company, Vern Weitzman, founder and CTO of Cira Apps, is rapidly becoming the go-to guy for insight and wisdom, as in this absorbing interview. Weitzman has seen business-threatening crises come and go - from the days of the dot-com bust to the present crisis - but he and his innovative companies always manage to survive, and prosper.
The successful SaaS company can skip the on-premise servers
Weitzman is particularly sound on his dawning realization that the cloud was going to be the main revenue driver for companies in the sector. Cloud-specific applications are cheaper to operate, easier to upgrade, and nearly seamless to your client base, he points out. And with wisely-deployed CX and a good content library, the path to SaaS profitability has never been clearer.
Read Vern Weitzman on scaling up your SaaS company with rich, granular content.
“... Existing customers began migrating from on-premise messaging to cloud-based Microsoft Office 365. I wish I could say that we moved faster, but I was initially skeptical about how many medium and large enterprises would migrate to the cloud. After exploring options and cloud technology, we decided to build cloud-specific applications for Office 365. We launched Cira Apps Ltd with its flagship SaaS solution CiraSync in April of 2016.
“ It was a natural evolution from hardware developer, to software developer, to tech team leader -- and then after 9/11, the critical need for our kind of solution became clear. I just enjoy coming up with a minimal viable product, getting something into beta and starting to get users on it.
“From there, you just keep whacking moles until there are no more moles to whack. Finally, you get to production and hopefully can get people to pay for it. I just like the whole process.”
Of course, there are sometimes more moles than hammers to whack ‘em with, as many a fallen SaaS provider has found -- and these are not easy times. It helps to love what you do, as Weitzman clearly does, but getting good strategic advice helps even more - and plenty of firms are happy to provide it. Having a firm grasp of the cloud technologies involved -- perhaps by upgrading your knowledge base -- will also pay off in the long term.
Every SaaS company faces a crowded, competitive field, which means, as Weitzman has noted elsewhere, the laborious work of differentiating your product from all the others has to underlie all your efforts. When you’re working in the cloud, you must keep your feet firmly on the ground.