Building a SaaS startup? Here’s what you should know.

Over the past decade, the public cloud has catalyzed a movement to make it easy to build applications in general. We’ve seen a proliferation of SaaS startups that commoditize software development into services, tools or frameworks that solve specific problems. A typical modern app is a melting pot of SaaS offerings that provide authentication, databases, file storage, analytics, reporting, monitoring, messaging etc. We’re in the “as a service” era.

While such proliferation is largely desirable, we’ve arrived at a new class of problems that are somewhat unfamiliar and treading new territory in software development, operations and talent management.

In this series of posts, I plan to address topics that have been net new learnings for me, having worked in this space for the past decade. Examples of areas I plan to cover are - API developer experience, breaking changes, SDKs and libraries, managing talent, Privacy, Spam, Authentication.