5 TRAPS YOU SHOULD AVOID BUILDING A SAAS BUSINESS

A Keynote presentet on SaaStock
by Dr. Ricco Deutscher

TRAP #3: LACK OF ARCHITECTURE

saastock keynote dr ricco deutscher trap 3- Lack of Architecture

Dr. Ricco Deutscher:

“I want to go back 20 years when I had my first start up which was a web-based marketing campaign tool. Today, we would say it was a SaaS company, but at that time the whole notion about SaaS did not exist yet.”

saastock keynote dr ricco deutscher trap 3- Lack of Architecture – my first web application

Dr. Ricco Deutscher:

“You see here, a typical architecture of a web application with a back-end and a web-based front end.”

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“And process integration at that time was pretty much front end-based and was pretty much manual. If you wanted to create a marketing campaign, you downloaded your CSV file from salesforce and uploaded that CSV file into your marketing campaign tool and this was okay. But as the market evolved, there was a demand for automating the process.”

saastock keynote dr ricco deutscher trap 3- Lack of Architecture – my first web application 2002

Dr. Ricco Deutscher:

“Meaning back-end to back-end integration. In order to meet that requirement, we added a second interface.”

saastock keynote dr ricco deutscher trap 3- Lack of Architecture – my first web application 2003

Dr. Ricco Deutscher:

“We had the first interface, the user interface, and the second one was the application programming interface. And which looks as a quick solution, is not a good solution in the long-term. Why? Because now you have redundancy. Redundancy in your logic. You need to maintain two different codes for the same logic. And that slows down innovation, that slows down the quality in your software, and that’s not good in the long-term.”

saastock keynote dr ricco deutscher trap 3- Lack of Architecture – billwerk today

Dr. Ricco Deutscher:

“A much better approach is what I call API-first approach. You think your product as an API, you sell to a certain service level and that API is open to the public and is very well documented. And for that API, this API doesn’t matter it’s a front-end connected to or not a back-end connected to.”