SaaS Development From First MVP To Live Platform
We build and grow subscription software, covering sign-up, billing, roles and the product itself, from the first MVP to a live platform. For Coach Catalyst we added a Stripe Connect marketplace and moved the front end to Vue 3 while customers kept using it.
Reviewed by Azmat Rana, CEO & Founder · Updated
What A SaaS Product Needs
A SaaS product is two things at once: the feature customers pay for, and the accounts, billing and admin that keep a subscription business running.
Core capability
Accounts, roles and teams
Sign-up, invitations and permissions for admins, team members and end customers.
Subscription billing
Plans, trials and upgrades through Stripe. Klingit bills its customers on multi-tier subscriptions.
Real-time features
Messaging, video and live updates. Whistle It runs secure video meetings on top of the open-source BigBlueButton engine.
Scheduled and bulk jobs
Work that runs in the background at scale. One40Connect sends scheduled and recurring text campaigns for its customers.
Data-heavy products
Products that crawl, track or process data all day. Clicks.so tracks thousands of keyword rankings without its server costs climbing.
Project story · Coach Catalyst
Turning a coaching tool into a marketplace that pays coaches directly
Coach Catalyst is a platform where fitness coaches run their client programs: scheduling, messaging and progress tracking. The product worked, but it was slow, hard to use and built on code that made new features risky.
- Team
- 2 engineers
- Effort
- 4,272 hours
- Payments
- Stripe Connect
- Stack
- Ruby on Rails, Vue 3, PostgreSQL, Redis
The problem
Pages loaded slowly and people struggled to finish tasks. Coaches had no built-in way to get paid by their clients. The chat module was written in CoffeeScript and struggled under load. The codebase had never been planned for a community feature, and the front end was still on Vue 2.
What we changed
- 01Redesigned the interface for clarity and cut load times by optimizing code, requests and media.
- 02Built a Stripe Connect marketplace with OAuth onboarding, so coaches get paid by their clients directly and payouts are handled securely.
- 03Rewrote the CoffeeScript chat in Vue.js with real-time updates that hold up under load.
- 04Added a community module in phases, isolating its components so the rest of the product kept working.
- 05Migrated the front end from Vue 2 to Vue 3 with the Composition API, which also reduced the bundle size.
Where it stands
The platform is faster and easier to use, and the marketplace opened a new revenue stream for coaches and for the business. That is typical of SaaS work: most of the value comes from improving a live product without interrupting the customers who pay for it.
Read the full Coach Catalyst case studyFrom Idea To Scale
We ship the smallest version paying customers will use, then let usage decide what comes next.
Discover
Shape The First Version
We agree the one workflow customers will pay for, plus sign-up and billing, and leave the rest for later.
Develop
Build For Many Customers
Tenant separation, roles and billing go in from the first sprint, with weekly demos of the product.
Scale
Grow With Usage
Product analytics show which features people use, and the roadmap follows them.
Technology Behind SaaS Products
The stack behind the subscription products in our portfolio.
React
Next.js
Node.js
Python
.NET
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
Google Cloud
GraphQL
Docker
KubernetesWhat To Get Right Early In A SaaS Product
Some SaaS decisions are cheap to change later and some are not. These are the ones we settle at the start.
How tenants are separated
Whether customers share a database or each get their own affects security, cost and how hard enterprise deals become later.
Billing and payouts
Subscriptions, trials, usage pricing or marketplace payouts like the Stripe Connect setup on Coach Catalyst all shape the data model.
Roles and permissions
Admins, team members and end customers need different access. Retrofitting permissions into a live product is slow and risky.
An MVP that is a real product
Ship the smallest version paying customers will use, with sign-up and billing working, and leave the rest for later.
Upgrades without downtime
Frameworks age. Coach Catalyst moved from Vue 2 to Vue 3 while customers kept using it, which is far easier when the code is kept tidy.
Usage data from day one
Product analytics show which features people pay for, so the roadmap follows evidence instead of guesses.
SaaS Products In Action
SaaS products from our portfolio.
Related services
Projects like this one usually involve these as well.
- Marketplace development
- Web app development
- Cloud migration and cloud services
- Software maintenance and support
Further reading: Moving a live SaaS from Vue 2 to Vue 3
Prefer to add engineers to your own team?
Hire full-time developers in the stacks we use for this work.
Hire Ruby on Rails developers
Hire Vue.js developers
Hire Python and Django developersSaaS Development FAQs
What founders and product leads ask before building a SaaS product.
Building software that customers subscribe to and use in a browser or an app. It also covers what a subscription business needs around it: accounts, billing, roles, onboarding and analytics.
Yes. An MVP should include the core workflow, sign-up and billing, so you learn whether people will pay. Everything else waits for evidence.
We decide early whether customers share tables scoped by tenant or get separate databases, based on your security needs and target customers. Then that rule is enforced in one place in the code.
Yes. On Coach Catalyst we rewrote the chat, migrated the front end to Vue 3 and added a Stripe Connect marketplace while the platform stayed live.
Yes. We can place full-time engineers in your team, or take on a defined part of the roadmap ourselves.
You do. Everything we build for you, including the source code and the intellectual property in it, belongs to you.
Ready To Build Your SaaS Product?
Tell us who will pay for it and the one job it has to do. We reply within one business day to set up a discovery call.