Chapter 7: setting up business operations for your startup

To run a profitable SaaS business, you must be able to recognize where your costs are coming from, or how much capital you need to operate. Start by familiarizing yourself with the fundamentals of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), gross margin, expenses, and cash flow.

Outsource what you need to from an accounting or tax perspective, but make sure your most experienced team member manages those numbers and regularly reports them transparently to the rest of the team: management transparency is one of the top factors that determine employee happiness. It can be as simple as creating an Excel sheet with your main metrics and going through it together every month. Having a successful operations manager on board could help your early-stage startup thrive.

The more complex your SaaS is, the more attention you need to pay to the legal aspect of your business. Put some effort into your Terms and Conditions (T&Cs) even before you get paying customers. Don’t just ‘wing it’. But don’t overdo it, either: just have a basic framework in place, think about your liabilities, and build a foundation so you don’t regret not having done it sooner.

If you offer a simple service, you can start by looking at services or businesses that do something similar to yours, even in a different industry or market: check what they highlight in their terms (look out for things like invoicing, confidentiality, obligations, indemnification, warranties, limitations, etc.) and use that as a framework. The same goes for your privacy policy.

If your service falls under regulatory aspects, or you have customers in several countries, you might need to consult or hire (part/full time) legal counsel. For example: if your SaaS helps with investment advice or stores bank records, you are entering a sector that is more prone to regulation and therefore requires more stringent T&Cs. If you have EU-based customers and are handling or storing personally identifiable information, you needed to become General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant by May 2018 or might face hefty fines in the future.  

As your business grows and your customers base expands, you will need to engage legal counsel on a more consistent basis: we recently updated our terms to version 3.0 (have a read-through here) and brought a legal counsel in-house for the first time. We also engaged four outside lawyers to review our new T&Cs: two from Malta, one from the US, and one from Germany, to ensure we would cover different territorial concerns for our international customer base.

When you think about implementing a process, define your success criteria first, then identify the sequence of events that will lead you there. You can then review and refine accordingly as you go along, depending on how close you are to your objective.

Also, remember that accountability is key: once you define your success criteria, you must make someone accountable for the journey to take you there. If you don’t know who owns a customer’s complaints, for example, then your processes need strengthening.

Most importantly, make processes important from the get-go: you can get by fine as a small team without clear processes, but building them now will provide strong foundations for future growth. After all, business development starts at the center of your business with your operations team.

Agile practices have been around for a while to help teams produce more value, faster. Instead of trying to deliver one big project all at once, an Agile team breaks it down into smaller chunks that get released regularly and iteratively.

You don’t have to go all-in right now and create complex processes—in fact, the whole point of Agile is starting small and continuously improving. Start like this:

• ask your team “what is the bare minimum we can ship to validate our ideas or prove/disprove a hypothesis at this point?”;
• work on shipping or releasing what you agreed to;
• stop and observe how the process went, and determine what you and your team can do to improve in the next iteration. This is the practice of retrospectives.

Use retrospectives on a regular basis to discuss what went well and what did not, review your process, and find bottlenecks and fix them (ps: we have a free retrospective template for you to copy and use, too). A useful business analysis from time to time can get you where you need to be. Hold larger retrospectives to look at the bigger picture too. For example: have quarterly retrospectives to examine what you’ve achieved, what your velocity has been, and whether or not what you shipped aligned with your projections and quarterly goals. This is especially useful for early-stage companies where your growth might be very fast.

If you want to bring Agile into your established organization, you will need to highlight and explain the benefits and get buy-in so the team will want to do it, as opposed to being forced to.

Before you think switching to Agile is a waste of time and money, consider Skype’s case: previously bought for around $2 million, the company moved to an Agile framework practically overnight and was later re-sold for $8.5 million thanks in part to this massive operational change. Sergei Anikin was working there as a manager at the time, and has some insights into how the change played out:

Sergei Anikin at Hotjar's XAwards event

• How We Run Our Growing Engineering Team at Pipedrive, Sergei Anikin
• SaaS Financial Model: Simple Template For Early-Stage Startups, Gary Gaspar
• A SaaS financial model you’ll actually update, Corey Haines

• Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell, Henrik Kniberg
• XAwards: Operations and Planning Panel, Antoine Bonello and Ken Weary
• XAwards: Execution Panel, Bob Jelica, Sergei Anikin, and Marc von Brockdorff

• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
• The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries
• The Elements of Scrum, Chris Sims and Hillary Louise Johnson