A non-technical founder’s guide to shipping a SaaS product

Start with the smallest sellable version

The most common and most expensive mistake is building too much before anyone pays. Your first version should do exactly one job for one type of customer, well enough that they will pay for it. Everything else is a hypothesis you have not earned the right to build yet.

Write down the single workflow the product performs, from the customer’s first click to the outcome they wanted. If that takes more than a page, cut it until it fits.

Know what you are actually paying for

A production web application is more than screens. Insist that any quote separates the parts, so you can compare fairly and see where cost sits.

• Discovery and architecture: deciding what to build and how the pieces fit.
• Frontend: the screens your customers use.
• Backend and data: accounts, records, business logic.
• Payments and access control: taking money and deciding who sees what.
• Infrastructure and deployment: where it runs and how it stays up.
• Testing and handover: proof it works and the keys to your own product.

Pay in milestones, never all upfront

A fair structure is staged. A common one is 40 percent to start, 30 percent at a working demo, 30 percent on delivery. Each payment should map to something you can actually see. If a provider wants everything before you see anything, that is not a scope problem, it is a risk problem.

Own the code, the accounts and the keys

Make it contractual: you own 100 percent of the source code, the cloud account and the credentials, from day one, not on full payment. The cloud account should be in your name so you can see the bills and change suppliers. A provider who will not agree to this is building a dependency, not a product.

Scope is the enemy, so freeze it

Every unmanaged change adds cost and delay. Agree a fixed scope in writing, then put anything new on a second list to price separately. Good studios will happily build version two; they just will not let version one grow forever for free.