How to Start a SaaS Company: A Founder's Guide

Having an idea for a SaaS company is just the beginning. The true challenge lies in transforming that concept into a viable business, particularly if you lack coding skills.

Establishing a successful SaaS startup involves making numerous thoughtful decisions. It’s not about one major revelation but rather a systematic approach: identify a genuine problem, confirm that people will pay for a solution, create the most basic version of that solution, and then secure your initial customers.

This guide serves as your blueprint, focusing on a lean, actionable plan suited for non-technical founders.

Your Guide to Building a SaaS Business

Facing the daunting task of launching a SaaS company can lead to feeling overwhelmed. The positive aspect? A computer science degree isn’t necessary to create a successful SaaS enterprise. Your most valuable asset is your ability to identify real problems and your commitment to market validation before any code is written.

We will explore a practical framework that emphasizes action over planning. The objective is straightforward: provide a clear, step-by-step path from an initial idea to a thriving, scalable business.

Essential Foundations of a SaaS Startup

A SaaS business revolves around delivering consistent, recurring value to customers, which generates steady, recurring revenue for the company. In contrast to one-time product sales, the success of a SaaS is evaluated by metrics such as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and customer retention rates (churn).

Consider this scenario: a founder observes that small accounting firms frequently request sensitive documents from clients via insecure email attachments. Instead of immediately developing a comprehensive client portal, the founder opts for a smaller initial step. They design a simple landing page promoting a secure, one-click document collection tool and launch a small, targeted ad campaign to gauge interest.

This small-scale experiment is low-cost but provides crucial insights. It confirms interest before significant expenses are incurred.

Key Insight: The contemporary approach to building a SaaS company emphasizes validation before development. The initial aim isn’t to create a flawless product; it’s to gather substantial proof that your solution addresses a pressing issue that customers are willing to pay to resolve.

This entire process is cyclical. You’ll continuously iterate through ideation, validation, building, and marketing, improving and refining your strategy with each cycle.

To stay organized, view your startup’s journey through these key stages. Each stage has a specific objective that builds on the previous one.

Core Pillars of a SaaS Startup

This table breaks down the fundamental stages every founder needs to master. Focusing on the key objective of each pillar will keep you from getting lost in the weeds and ensure you’re always working on what matters most.

Nail each of these stages, in order, and you’ll have a rock-solid foundation for building a company that can go the distance.

Finding and Validating Your SaaS Idea

Every great SaaS company starts with a problem. Not code, not a fancy feature list, but a clear, nagging pain point that people are desperate to solve. This is where your journey begins—in the trenches of finding an idea and then proving it’s actually worth your time and money.

So many founders get hung up on trying to invent the next big thing from scratch. A much better approach? Look for problems in places you already know inside and out. For example, the founders of Slack weren’t trying to build a chat app; they were building a video game and created an internal tool to communicate better. They realized the tool was more valuable than the game.

Uncovering Problems Worth Solving

The most valuable ideas aren’t usually lightning bolts of inspiration; they’re everyday annoyances. You just have to learn how to spot them.

A fantastic place to start is your own professional life. Think about the tasks you do that feel clunky or ripe for human error. Maybe it’s the marketing team struggling to track ROI across dozens of small campaigns. Or a small law firm drowning in disorganized client documents. These aren’t just complaints; they’re giant, flashing signs pointing to a business opportunity.

This “scratch your own itch” method is how countless successful SaaS companies were born. A founder gets fed up with a problem, sees that the current tools are garbage, and decides to build something better. Right away, you have a huge advantage: you’re customer zero.

Once you have a hunch, it’s time to see if others feel the same way. Online communities are absolute goldmines for this.

• Niche Subreddits: Forums like r/SaaS, r/startups, or industry-specific ones (think r/realtors or r/landscaping) are filled with people openly venting about their challenges.

• Twitter and LinkedIn: Follow industry leaders and hashtags in your space. People love to complain online. Pay attention to what they’re asking for help with. A search for “is there a tool that” can reveal dozens of ideas.

• Review Sites: Go look at the 1- and 2-star reviews for existing software in your target market. The “cons” section is basically a pre-written list of features people wish they had.

Take a look at a typical post from the r/SaaS subreddit. Founders and aspiring entrepreneurs are constantly discussing everything from pricing headaches to technical roadblocks.

Posts like this give you a direct line into the real-world anxieties of your potential customers. It’s raw, unfiltered insight into what keeps them up at night—and what they might pay to fix.

From Idea to Evidence-Based Validation

Having an idea is exciting, but let’s be real: it’s just an assumption. The next step is validation, and it’s non-negotiable. This is where you gather cold, hard proof that people not only have this problem but are also willing to pay for a solution. It’s how you separate a hobby from a real business.

Key Takeaway: Validation isn’t asking your friends, “Hey, would you use this?” It’s about creating a scenario where people demonstrate real interest with their actions—like giving you their email address or, even better, pulling out a credit card.

You can start testing the waters with some cheap, high-learning experiments.

• The “Smoke Test” Landing Page: Before you write a single line of code, build a simple one-page website. This page needs to nail the problem and your proposed solution. Use a killer headline, a few bullet points on the benefits, and one clear call-to-action (CTA), like “Request Early Access” or “Get Notified at Launch.”

• Run a Micro-Ad Campaign: Spend a little money to drive targeted traffic to your landing page. You can use Google Ads, LinkedIn, or Facebook. A budget of just $100-$200 is enough to see if your message connects. The number you care about here is the email signup conversion rate. If you’re seeing 5-10% or more, that’s a fantastic sign.

• Actually Talk to People: Reach out to every single person who signed up. Schedule quick 15-20 minute calls and just listen. Your goal isn’t to sell; it’s to deeply understand their pain. Ask open-ended questions like “Tell me about the last time you dealt with this problem” and let them do most of the talking.

The opportunity in SaaS is massive. The market is expected to hit $300 billion globally in 2025, and the average organization is already juggling 275 different SaaS apps. This shows businesses are more than willing to buy software, but it also points to a huge problem: an estimated 53% of SaaS licenses go unused. Your validated idea could be the one that actually solves a problem and gets used every day. You can dig into more of these fascinating SaaS statistics on Zylo.com.

Let’s say a founder thinks businesses need a better way to manage all those software subscriptions. They could validate this by throwing up a landing page with the headline, “Stop Wasting Money on Unused Software.”

By running a small ad campaign targeting IT managers and watching the signups, they can quickly tell if they’ve hit a nerve. If the signups roll in and the follow-up interviews confirm the pain, they’ve got solid evidence to move forward.

This process turns your idea from a gut feeling into a data-backed hypothesis.

Building Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Alright, you’ve validated your idea and confirmed it solves a real, painful problem for a specific group of people. Now for the exciting part: actually building something.

But hold on. Before you start dreaming of a polished, bells-and-whistles product, we need to talk about the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This is your first tangible step into the market, and getting it right is crucial, especially for non-technical founders.

An MVP isn’t a buggy, half-baked prototype. Think of it as a strategic weapon. Its only job is to solve your user’s most critical problem using the absolute fewest features possible. This lets you launch faster, get priceless feedback from real users, and learn what actually matters—all without burning through your budget on things nobody asked for.

This whole process, from a rough concept to a market-ready solution, is a focused sprint.

It’s about blending just enough design with just enough code to create that core, functional product. Nothing more, nothing less.

Escaping the Feature Creep Trap

One of the biggest killers of early-stage SaaS companies is feature creep. It’s that tempting voice that whispers, “Let’s just add one more feature before we launch.” Before you know it, you’ve delayed your launch by months, blown your budget, and created a bloated, confusing product.

You need to be ruthless about feature prioritization. A fantastic framework for this is the MoSCoW method. It’s a simple but powerful way to force hard decisions and keep your focus laser-sharp.

• Must-Have: These are the absolute, non-negotiable features. Without them, your product is basically useless. For a project management tool, this would be things like “create a task” and “assign a due date.”

• Should-Have: These are important and add a lot of value, but the product can still function without them for the initial launch. Think “comment on a task.”

• Could-Have: These are the “nice-to-haves.” They’re desirable but have a much smaller impact. If you have the time and resources to spare (which you probably don’t), you can consider them. An example might be “custom color themes.”

• Won’t-Have (for now): This is just as important as the “Must-Have” list. These are features you explicitly decide not to build for this version. This keeps the team focused and manages expectations. Things like a “Gantt chart view” or “API integrations” would likely fall here.

Using this framework changes the entire conversation. It moves you from a dreamy “What could we build?” to a strategic “What must we build to deliver value on day one?”

Key Insight: Your MVP is not your final product. It’s a learning vehicle. The goal is to build just enough to test your core hypothesis with real people who might actually pay you.

Choosing Your Development Path

As a non-technical founder, you’ve got three main roads you can take to bring your MVP to life. Each has its pros and cons, and the right choice really comes down to your budget, timeline, and what you see for the business long-term.

Let’s make this real. Say you’re a marketing manager with a great idea for a simple social media scheduling tool. You could jump on a no-code platform like Bubble or Webflow and potentially have a working MVP in just a few weeks. You could build it yourself, prove the concept, and maybe even get your first paying customers.

But if your idea is an AI-powered analytics platform for enterprise logistics, that’s a different beast. A no-code tool isn’t going to cut it. In that case, you’re much better off spending the time to find a technical co-founder or hiring a specialist freelancer with a background in data science.

The trick is to match the development path to the complexity of the problem you’re solving. A great product development partner like VeryCreatives can be invaluable here, helping you navigate these choices to ensure your MVP gets built efficiently and sets you up for long-term success.

Defining Your Business and Pricing Strategy

Alright, you’ve got a validated idea and a rough sketch of your MV. That’s a huge step. But a product, no matter how brilliant, isn’t a business. Now it’s time to build the commercial engine around it.

This is where you shift from being a product visionary to a business builder. We’re not talking about some dusty, 40-page business plan nobody will ever read. We’re talking about making a few smart, deliberate decisions on how you’ll actually make money and who you’ll sell to. This is what turns your code and features into a real, functioning company.

Laying the Foundation: Your Core Business Pillars

A lean business plan for a SaaS startup doesn’t need to be complicated. It really just needs to answer three questions: Who are we selling to? How do we find them? And how do we get paid?

First things first, get laser-focused on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). For example, instead of “small businesses,” a strong ICP is “solo-run e-commerce stores using Shopify with over $5,000 in monthly sales.” What’s their job title? What are the daily frustrations that make them want to throw their keyboard out the window? What software are they already using, and where do they go online to complain or ask for advice?

Once you know who you’re talking to, you can figure out how to talk to them. This is your initial go-to-market strategy. Keep it simple. Seriously. For a brand new company, it could look something like this:

• Initial Channel: Find three specific LinkedIn groups where our ICP lives and start participating. Not selling, just helping.

• Content Angle: We’ll write five blog posts that directly answer the biggest questions our ICP has about their core problem.

• Conversion Goal: All roads lead to our demo request page.

Here’s the thing: Your first business plan is just a collection of educated guesses. The point isn’t to get it perfect on day one. It’s about having a starting point you can immediately start testing, measuring, and tweaking as soon as real people start using your product.

How Will You Make Money? Choosing a Pricing Model

Pricing is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal, but so many founders treat it like an afterthought. Your pricing model isn’t just a number on a page; it’s a direct reflection of the value you provide. Get it right, and it can rocket you forward. Get it wrong, and it’s like trying to swim upstream.

Here are the usual suspects you’ll see in the SaaS world:

• Tiered Pricing: This is the most common model for a reason. You create a few different packages (think Basic, Pro, Enterprise) at different price points, each with a different set of features. It’s a fantastic way to serve different types of customers and give them a clear path to upgrade as they grow.

• Per-User Pricing: Simple, predictable, and easy for customers to understand. You charge a set fee for every person on a team using the software. This is a no-brainer for collaboration tools where every new user adds more value to the team.

• Usage-Based Pricing: Customers only pay for what they actually use—whether that’s API calls, gigabytes of storage, or the number of contacts they manage. Mailchimp, for example, prices based on the number of email contacts.

• Flat-Rate Pricing: One price for all the features. This is simple and transparent. Basecamp is a famous example, offering all its features for a single monthly price, regardless of user count.

So, how do you choose? It all comes back to your product’s core value. If value is unlocked with more features, tiered pricing is your best bet. If value comes from having more people on the platform, per-user is the way to go. And if your product acts more like a utility, usage-based feels natural.

The Numbers That Keep You Alive: Must-Track SaaS Metrics

You can’t fix what you can’t see. The second you get your very first user, you need to start tracking a few key numbers. Think of these as the vital signs of your business—they tell you what’s working, what’s bleeding, and when you need to call a doctor.

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): This is the lifeblood of a SaaS company. It’s the predictable, recurring revenue you can count on every single month.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Simply put, if you spend $500 on ads and get 10 new customers, your CAC is $50.

• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): The total amount of money you expect to make from a single customer over their entire time with you. A healthy SaaS business needs an LTV that is at least 3x its CAC.

• Churn Rate: The percentage of your customers who cancel their subscription in a given period (usually a month). High churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies. It’s like trying to fill a bucket with a massive hole in the bottom.

Bootstrapped companies—the ones growing without a safety net of investor cash—live and die by these numbers. For bootstrapped SaaS businesses with revenues between $3 million and $20 million ARR, the median growth rate is projected to be around 20% in 2025. But the top 10%? They’re growing at an incredible 51%. That gap is all about execution.

These high-performers also report a median Net Revenue Retention (NRR) of 104%, which means they’re not just keeping customers, they’re successfully growing the revenue from them. You can dive deeper into these numbers and see how you compare by checking out the latest benchmarks for bootstrapped SaaS businesses from SaaS Capital.

Understanding these metrics isn’t just for spreadsheets. SaaS metrics are the foundation for every strategic decision you’ll make, from how much to spend on ads to what features to build next. They are what will ultimately determine whether you build a lasting, sustainable company or become another statistic.

Getting the Word Out and Landing Your First Customers

You’ve got a validated MVP and a solid idea of your pricing. Now comes the hard part—and the fun part. A brilliant product means nothing if the people who need it most don’t even know it exists.

The road from zero to your first hundred customers isn’t about throwing money at ads. It’s about being scrappy, hands-on, and doing things that, frankly, don’t scale.

Think of it this way: you’re not trying to start a forest fire. You’re trying to build a small, contained, but intensely hot campfire. The tactics that land you those crucial first ten customers are completely different from what will get you to a thousand. This early game is all about direct, personal engagement.

Winning Over Your First 10 Customers

Forget about elaborate marketing funnels or obsessing over SEO right now. Your first ten customers will almost certainly come from you reaching out and finding them one by one. Time to roll up your sleeves.

Where do you find them? Go back to where you started.

• Online Communities: Remember those niche Reddit, Slack, or LinkedIn groups where you first validated your idea? Head back there. But don’t just spam a link. Become a genuine, helpful member of the community. Answer questions, give advice, and when the moment is right, mention how your tool solves the exact problem someone is talking about.

• Building in Public: Share your startup journey on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) or LinkedIn. Be transparent. Post updates on your progress, talk about the hurdles you’re clearing, and share the feedback you’re getting. This builds an incredible amount of trust and attracts other founders and early adopters who want to be part of your story.

• Direct Outreach: Identify 20 companies that perfectly match your Ideal Customer Profile. Find the right contact person and send them a personalized email offering them a free trial and a 15-minute onboarding call with you, the founder.

This phase is a grind, no doubt about it. But every single conversation is gold. You’re not just selling; you’re getting critical feedback that sharpens your messaging and improves your product with every interaction.

The Big Picture: Your first users aren’t just customers. They’re your co-creators. They provide the raw, unfiltered feedback and the first glowing testimonials that will convince everyone else to give you a shot.

Scaling to 50 and Then 100 Users

Once you have a small but mighty base of happy customers and some powerful testimonials, you can start building more scalable ways to attract new users. The focus shifts from one-to-one outreach to one-to-many marketing.

A targeted beta launch is an excellent way to build momentum. You can offer a limited number of spots for early access, maybe at a discount or with some exclusive perks. This creates scarcity and a sense of “I want in,” which drives sign-ups.

How to Run a Killer Beta Launch

This isn’t just about user acquisition. You’re building a tribe of evangelists. These early adopters feel a sense of ownership and often become your most passionate advocates. Their success stories are the most authentic and powerful marketing assets you could ever ask for.

As you close in on that 100-customer milestone, these foundational pieces—community and content—will become the engine that powers your next phase of growth and sets the stage for a more formal go-to-market strategy.

Scaling Your SaaS for Long-Term Growth

Once you’ve landed that first wave of customers, the entire game changes. You’re no longer just trying to survive day-to-day. The focus shifts from short-term wins to building a machine for sustainable, long-term growth.

The scrappy, founder-led tactics that got you this far have to evolve. What was once a sprint of individual heroics now needs to become a well-oiled, repeatable system. This is where you lay the foundation for true scale.

Your product roadmap is the first thing that needs a strategic overhaul. It can’t just be about your gut feelings anymore. It’s time to build a formal process for collecting, analyzing, and prioritizing feature requests. You’re now balancing customer feedback, competitive pressures, and your own long-term vision to enhance the core product while selectively adding new capabilities.

Transitioning from Founder to Sales Team

In the early days, you were the entire sales team. Your passion and intimate product knowledge were all you needed to close those first crucial deals. But that approach simply doesn’t scale. To grow, you have to transition from founder-led sales to a dedicated, process-driven team.

This starts by documenting what actually works. Your messaging, your ideal customer profile, your methods for handling objections—all of it needs to be captured in a sales playbook. Your first sales hire should be someone who can not only follow this playbook but also help you refine it.

Key Insight: The goal for your first sales hire isn’t just to sell. It’s to help you build a repeatable sales process that future hires can plug into, effectively turning sales from an art into a science.

The Venture Capital Decision

As your growth starts to pick up speed, the question of raising venture capital will almost certainly come up. It’s not a mandatory step for every company, but it can be rocket fuel for rapid expansion. When they’re considering an investment, VCs look for very specific signals in a SaaS business.

Strong Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth and a large, active user base are at the top of their list.

Just look at the AI search company Perplexity. Founded in 2022, it showed incredible traction right out of the gate. By May 2025, it was handling over 100 million weekly queries from 30 million active users. This kind of user engagement and explosive growth helped it lock down a $500 million funding round, pushing its valuation to a staggering $14 billion in under three years. You can see more details on leading US SaaS startups and their growth at Omnius.so.

Raising capital is a strategic choice that means trading equity for speed. It gives you the cash to invest heavily in your product, marketing, and team to grab market share before anyone else can. But be warned: it also brings intense pressure and high expectations for performance, fundamentally changing your company’s path and your role as a founder.

Common Questions About Starting a SaaS Company

When you’re just starting out on your SaaS journey, the same questions tend to pop up again and again. It’s completely normal to wrestle with concerns about technical skills, funding, and knowing where to even begin.

Let’s cut through the noise and get you some straightforward answers to the most common hurdles new founders face.

Do I Need a Technical Co-Founder?

This is a big one. The short answer? Not necessarily. While having a technical partner in the trenches with you is a massive advantage, it’s absolutely not a deal-breaker. Plenty of successful founders have launched without one by simply getting resourceful.

You’ve got a few solid paths forward:

• Hire Freelance Developers: Sites like Upwork or Toptal are goldmines for finding skilled developers for specific projects. This works great when you have a crystal-clear, well-defined scope for your MVP.

• Partner with a Product Agency: A specialized firm, like our team at VeryCreatives, can essentially become your dedicated product team. We can jump in and handle everything from refining your strategy to full-scale development and execution.

• Embrace No-Code Tools: Don’t underestimate the power of platforms like Bubble or Webflow. You can build surprisingly robust applications without writing a single line of code, which is perfect for whipping up an MVP to see if your idea has legs.

At the end of the day, it’s less about being a coder yourself and more about having a sharp product vision and the ability to manage the people who will bring it to life.

How Much Money Do I Need to Start?

The cost of starting a SaaS company can vary wildly. It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer.

On one end of the spectrum, you can bootstrap a business on a shoestring budget. This lean approach means you’re relying on no-code tools and focusing your energy on organic, community-based marketing. The goal here is to get validation before you start spending serious cash. A simple MVP built with a no-code tool might cost less than $1,000 in subscriptions and initial ad spend.

The reality is, the cost to launch can range from a few hundred dollars for basic tools and a landing page to tens of thousands if your idea demands complex custom development and an aggressive ad campaign from day one.

If your MVP requires sophisticated features right out of the gate or you need a big marketing splash to get noticed, your initial costs can climb fast. A custom-developed MVP could easily range from $25,000 to $75,000+. The smartest play is almost always to start lean, prove that your idea actually solves a painful problem for people, and then seek investment or reinvest your early revenue to fuel growth.

What Is the Most Important Metric for a New SaaS?

In the very beginning, your most critical metrics aren’t found on a spreadsheet. They’re qualitative. You need to be obsessed with user engagement and direct feedback.

Are people actually logging in every day? Are they using the one core feature you built to solve their biggest problem? These are the questions that matter most. One useful, albeit informal, metric is the “Did they even notice?” test. If you temporarily disable a feature and no one complains, it probably wasn’t that important.

Once you gain some traction and land your first paying customers, your focus will naturally shift. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) quickly becomes the North Star for your financial health and growth.

But MRR is only half the story. You must also be fanatical about tracking your customer churn rate. This number tells you how good you are at keeping the customers you worked so hard to win in the first place. High churn is a leaky bucket that will sink your business, no matter how much new revenue you pour in.

Want help dialing in the right budget and metrics for your SaaS? Book a quick call and we’ll break it all down, step by step.