How to Start a SaaS Business without knowing how to programme?
By: Reshmi Menon
Tags: Saas Tools, Project Management, Entrepreneur, B2B, SaaS

Many entrepreneurs have great ideas to start a SaaS Business and know ways to market and sell the product. But what they lack is the ability to build the product as they do not have the needed programming skills. But that must never stop one from pursuing their dream of starting a business if they are passionate about it.

There are multiple options available now and you don’t need to know how to programme to start a business. In this blog, I present a few tried and tested methods which are used by non-technical founders:

4 ways of starting a SaaS Business without knowing how to programme

#1 DIY: Ideate, Validate and Create

Ideate-Validate-Create

Ideate: Your idea needs to be a combination of your own skill, knowledge, aptitude coupled with the actual need for this idea.

Validate: Once you have thought upon the idea, create a simple presentation deck and test your hypothesis by sending an email or talking to 50 potential customers. 80% of the people might find your idea interesting but may not be willing to pay for it. Try to get a few committed customers who will be willing to buy your product once you launch it. Thus this validates your value proposition and proves that your idea has a market opportunity.

Create: Hire someone to build the minimum viable product(MVP). Convert your ideas into a working model with a functional app or website that will help you prove or disprove your hypothesis. You can look out for freelancer developers in websites like Upwork and Guru. This is definitely not a final product and might be too far from the final one, but this will help you determine if you are able to solve the problem of your target audience and if your audience finds value in your product.

Find a technical Co-Founder: This is the toughest part, especially when you are first time founder and do not have significant credentials. Convincing good developers to work with you is very hard because they will already have many opportunities in their kitty. You can find a technical co-founder at https://cofounderslab.com/ and https://angel.co/.

Pro Tip: You cannot get a startup idea if you look for startup ideas. You have to find a scalable solution to the problem you face. Many entrepreneurs do not lookout for ideas. They try to solve their personal business problems and thus end up creating a product or service. The project management software, TeamWave, was built to solve the employees’ own frustration with productivity apps.

#2 White Label Partnership

We all know that the technology business is highly competitive. Building a software product from scratch is a high-risk option and may take up a lot of time. Also, IT or Software projects usually have a very high failure rate. But, what if I say that there a way to mitigate this risk?

Solution: You can consider a white label solution, rather than building the whole product yourself. When we compare the options available to the non-technical founders, white-label licensing has the least risk.

Benefits of a White Label solution

Increases brand credibility — as you are able to provide the best services to your clients Expand the product offerings — You can provide more white-label offerings to your list of product offerings. Save time — It is easy to brand the white label solution and you don’t have to spend time on researching and developing the solution yourself. Faster service to customers — If you do not respond to your customer’s needs quickly they might jump in for help to your competitors. With white label solutions, you use proven technology to cater to their needs faster. Gaining access to exceptional talents — As we mentioned earlier, it is not easy to hire and manage a group of experts. But with a white label solution, you are getting access to talented people who will help you in ideation and developing customized features for your clients. Can focus more on core competency — The businesses can focus on their area of expertise and utilize their resources to efficiently build those competencies.

TeamWave is Small Business CRM, Project Management & HR software. An all-in-one platform. Join a community of 12,000+ users in 18 countries. Apply for the white-label partnership program.

#3 Buy a SaaS Business

Now, this is another common scenario. Few technical people might know how to make a cool product but may not have any clue about how to market it.

So the option for such people is to buy an existing SaaS business which is validated in the market and then build a better strategy for it. Here are a few websites, where you can find listings of SaaS/Software businesses for sale:

Pro Tip: There is no guarantee that buying another business will turn out to be successful. You need to be careful or else you could get stuck with uncooperative employees, obsolete technology, or unhappy customers. So be careful and do a thorough background check before you buy a SaaS business.

#4 Partner or Invest in a SaaS Startup

You can also join a startup (which already has initial traction) as a Co-founder than to start a SaaS business from scratch on your own. There are many talented developers who have a promising product that needs help with marketing, sales and likely capital.

The best way to discover such SaaS startups that are looking for Co-founders is to signup on Angel List: