Hack your SaaS growth with AWS SaaS Factory

Our speaker today is Mr Oded Rosenmann from the AWS SaaS Factory. So please give me a big hand to Odet to take it away.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Um yeah, thanks so much for coming out. As the slide says, my name is Rosenman. I'm a Global Practice Lead on the SaaS Factory team.

Um so what we do is we work with organizations that are building and growing their SaaS solutions on AWS and in this session, um I think one of the things that we've seen is that many organizations are just driving growth and um accelerating growth is challenging for them. So they are looking for guidance that can help them navigate the transition to SaaS as well as grow their solutions and drive adoption post launch.

Um so if you are building migrating or optimizing SaaS solutions on AWS, this session is for you, and we'll talk about how our team can help you grow your SaaS business with AWS. And if it's not your orientation by all means, I'll understand if you would like to find a different session that is a better fit for yourself.

Um but this is a quick agenda:

First, um introduction to SaaS Factory. I want to make sure that you understand what our team does and how we can help you grow your SaaS business.

Um I think over the past few years, we had the opportunity to engage with thousands of organizations who been SaaS on AWS and we've seen many who succeeded and some who haven't.

Um so I'd like to share here a few of the key learnings from those direct engagements and four key uh SaaS parts and hacks that can help you grow your SaaS business.

And at the end, I'll try to leave you with some key resources that can help you get started quickly.

So uh first thing, first, SaaS Factory is a program that is designed for organizations that are building and all um running their SaaS businesses on AWS. And um our core way is to help them navigate the transition and help them grow their solution post launch.

And there are three core ways in which we do that.

First one is we provide access to SaaS experts. So we have on our team, SaaS Factory solution architects and business specialists who are experts in SaaS and can provide guidance and support.

And then the other piece is that we extended it to a collective community of SI and GSI partners who have been vetted by AWS to have deep expertise in SaaS and can help organizations actually transform to a SaaS business model.

Then the second piece is that we take these learnings from those direct engagements and we invest in development of thought leadership content. If you would go to our website, now, you would see probably more than 200 artifacts there with key SaaS business topics and technical topics that can provide guidance and support.

And then lastly, um we kind of take that as well and we build open source reference solutions. Uh so we make investment in making sure that we have uh things like reference, architecture and simple code that can help accelerate the time for SaaS builders.

And these are pretty much the three core ways that we provide support.

So you would see here some of the organizations that we have helped them to build and launch SaaS solutions on AWS in the past few years. As you can see from the logos here, it varies from very early stage start ups to market leaders like F5, ADP, Adobe, Nasdaq and others.

And I think that over the past few years, we've seen growing demand for support. I think more organizations are looking at even portfolio of products that they would like to move to SaaS on AWS. But they find that the journey there is pretty challenging and they are looking for guidance and support that can help them be successful.

So the first hard that I would like to highlight is short term development strategy. I think that one of the biggest mistakes that I see is organizations that are building their architectural strategy for the next 10 or 20 customers. But don't think long term, one of the worst case scenarios that you can see is organizations that are hitting a spike in growth but then are not able to support it operationally.

So we want to make sure that early on in the journey we invest in agility and scalability. So then when we hit that spike in growth, we are ready to actually support effectively our customers.

I think that, you know, if you would come to me tomorrow and say, hey, here is my architectural um SaaS multi-tenant architectural diagram and let's assume that you have done an awesome work and implemented everything right with micro services and tenant isolation and everything there. If you would say to me that, hey, I'm ready, I've got my SaaS solution. I would say that you are probably not ready if you haven't thought about these other bits.

So I think it's a combination of those two things, the application plan and the control plan that makes a great SaaS where you have to think about how the tiers of your systems are going to work, how I'm going to manage and operate it as a SaaS business. How am I going to actually measure customer activity? How do I know what tenants are actually doing and what they are using in my system. And how do I go to zero downtown implementation as well as reduce agility and reduce cycle time, increase agility and reduce cycle time.

So I'm able to get from an idea to actually put in a new feature in the customer hands as quickly as possible. So if you got those two things in place, I would say you are ready to run and operate a SaaS business model as you should.

I think um SignNow is a good example of a company who did it very well. If you are not familiar with their business, they have eSignature and document management solution as a SaaS model on AWS. And they've used AWS serverless to scale in and out and meet customer needs. And you can see here just a few of the things that were able to achieve with those serverless architecture that have implemented leveraging AWS Lambda and Amazon's TimeStreams.

So they were able to reduce response time. I think their response time before that was eight hours and it was reduced to zero hours self service in and out to meet customer needs pay only for what they need. Again, elasticity, elasticity in the system, repurpose the time for their customers success and support teams to actually higher value engagements with customers. And then the development time to get it up and running as a self service kind of on demand dashboard took them only two weeks.

The second harder that I would like to highlight is limited time. I think that I see many organizations that have really long multiyear plan for their SaaS transformation. And the problem is that is um well, they think they have a captive market and a good customer base and steady revenue stream. But again, the problem is that you cannot really test your environment and validate your assumptions if you are not getting a minimum viable product out there as soon as you can.

So you are building what you think your customer want, but you have no way to actually collect feedback, track data about usage of your system and actually shift based on customer needs. And in parallel, obviously, competitors can come in and then you will find yourself in a catch up mode.

So our recommendation would be to get an MVP out there as soon as possible start to interact with early adopters. And it doesn't mean only to kind of test your feature functionality. It also has business implementation. If I'm getting an MVP out there, I'm able to test my price and packaging strategy. I'm able to test how I'm engaging with my customers. Success teams to make customers actually successful through the journey from on boarding adoption, expansion and renewal in the SaaS environment. And this is the key for being successful to address that I think our team has been super focused over the last few years in kind of making sure that we build the right solution that can accelerate time for SaaS builders.

There are so many kind of repeatable actions and tasks that builders are doing while building solutions on AWS and we want to minimize this time. And I think what we have observed also that any deviation from best practices can lead to a cumulative inefficiency inefficiencies in your SaaS environment.

So we want to make sure that customers are able to follow best practices and get accelerated time to market to get their products as soon as possible out there.

Um so I'm happy to announce, we just launched it la last week. Uh the SaaS Solution Library which is available on our SaaS on AWS page. It's a collection of presigned architectural strategies and design patterns that can simplify kind of the development for SaaS builders and you will see if you go there.

So those are open source and been built by our team. Um and you will also see side by side the collection of partner owned IP solutions that can help accelerate the time for SaaS builders as well as service offerings from our community of SI and GSI partners who provide support.

Um so I think, you know, I want to encourage you to check it out. I'll have the link to this page afterwards, but definitely this is one example of G8 Telesis who leverage one of our solutions called SaaS Boost. If you are not familiar with G8 Telesis, they are one of the biggest commercial aviation companies in the world. And our team provided support to help them build a fraud detection, a PISA solution on AWS.

Um I think like you can see here from the quote from the CIO you know, time to market was key for them and the leverage of SaaS Boost and our open source reference solutions just help them to accelerate the time until launch and get their solution out there as soon as possible.

The third piece that I would like to highlight as a key challenge and a hurdle for SaaS is skill talent. I think that you know, the depth of SaaS migrations and optimizations goes much beyond kind of the technical effort. You have to think about the business strategy and have a customer focused on how you en your team to engage in the new SaaS model, how our sales marketing, customer success, product development and operations team are interacting and engaging with customers is going to be completely different than the traditional approaches that we have been used so far, right?

So we have to not only make sure that we have the right talent with the right skills on paper, but actually to make it an execution, an executable plan for them to act upon.

So one of the most kind of uh useful exercise that that we do with customers is building a journey map of customer journey map. Um what you do there is you go through the different stages of a SaaS kind of consumption from on boarding, adoption, expansion, renewal, and more. And you think what are the different interactions that we have with customers and how our teams can use processes well defined processes and tools to actually optimize those interactions and create a better customer experience along the entire life cycle of a customer with us.

So I think in this case, again, you think how you create these processes create these approaches for your teams. But if you don't have the teams in place, it will require you to hire new talent or leverage support from external organizations that can provide this and fill in this gap for you.

Um so one of the things that we've done to kind of address this challenge is that we have launched the SaaS competency for consulting partners.

Um those are um kind of we have 46 now you see here 45 but we have just on boarded Accenture last week as well. They are not on the slide, but those have been vetted by our team to have the right expertise to support complex SaaS transformations on AWS.

I think that our data shows that um customers and organizations who lever that support from those partners are able to increase their project success rate and accelerate time to market.

Um so definitely I encourage you to kind of think whether you need to add some extra support, think whether it makes sense for you to engage with one of these partners because we've seen much better results and success when organizations are doing.

So. One example for this is the Scale Factory, this is one of our leading SaaS competency partners based out of the UK. They have helped trading company Coupling to launch a new SaaS solution on AWS. And like you see here on the slide, like the quote from Steve the CTO, he said that time to market was the key challenge for them and being able to leverage support from the Scale Factory helped them not only to accelerate time to market but making sure that they are following best practices and keeping the bars super super high for their application.

So the first hurdle that I would like to highlight that the key challenge is growth.

Um I think, you know, over the years, we've seen so many organizations that were focused on kind of the launch process. So how we get from an idea and developing our solution and actually launching it in general availability, but then they struggle to drive adoption and actually grow their solutions post launch.

Um so we really need to think about the SaaS model again, from a business perspective, how you create a land and expense strategy where you create a seamless experience where you can try the solution and afterwards convert it to actual purchase customers.

Um where your different teams including marketing and sales will take probably a different role in the engagement with customers. And also organizations are shifting to product led growth and other go to market approaches where the product itself becomes the main vehicle for us to acquire, activate and retain our customers.

So it really requires a different level of investment. And from my perspective, kind of looking at this, you know, growth for SaaS companies, it's not a necessity, it's survival. If you are not driving growth for your SaaS application, you will not see any value back to your business. So you need to make sure that you have an executable plan with your teams on how to do that in a different way, probably than the traditional way that you have used to do it before.

One of the things that you can potentially leverage to address that is AWS Marketplace to amplify our growth. I think over the last few years, we've seen just a tremendous growth with Marketplace, especially for SaaS businesses. Currently, we have over 33,000 active customers. Those that have at least one subscribe kind of listing as part of the engagement with Marketplace. Over 3500 software vendors, over 70 categories and more than 3000 listings.

And in 2022 we seen kind of billions of dollars that are being sold for SaaS organizations by SaaS organizations on the AWS Marketplace with sales actually being almost doubled this year that year.

So I think many of the organizations, it's not a good fit for everyone. But if it's a good fit for your SaaS business, I would like to urge you to explore this as a new revenue stream for your business and something else that you can leverage to drive growth and activate kind of go to market and coastal motion with AWS.

Just a few weeks ago, we've launched a new incentive program called AWS Marketplace List and Sell. This is a program to leverage support from qualified AWS Marketplace, including SaaS competency partners that we saw before and Marketplace Integrations integrators to help you list your solution on Marketplace and drive sales.

Um after your listing has been published on the Marketplace, so I encourage you to check it out with your AWS contact person and ask about AWS Marketplace List and Sell and how you can leverage this program to drive growth together with AWS.

One of the great examples around Marketplace is Friend Michael. Our team had the opportunity to support their SaaS efforts directly. And you can see here the quote from the COO saying that in Q3 of 2022 their Marketplace sales by 150% year over year while the entire other ARR business was going at 80%. Just a good example of how they were able to create a new revenue stream for their business.

And we see just more and more SaaS organizations that are leveraging the Marketplace again, to kind of initiate a go to market in coastal motion with AWS and drive growth for their SaaS businesses.

So I covered only four hards and hacks um in this session, obviously, there are many more and I think one, I want to offer our team support if you think you have SaaS in plans or you have already launched your SaaS solution and struggling to drive adoption and growth.

I think we are happy to kind of engage and support you with our SaaS experts of solution architects and business specialists.

Um a few key resources.

Uh the first one is the SaaS on AWS page. This is where you will also be able to find the SaaS Solutions Library, which I talked about before.

Um the second is the Domain Experts, this direct to the SaaS competency consulting partner page.

Um so those SI and GSI partners that have deep expertise in SaaS and can help you navigate SaaS transformations and optimizations.

And third is to join the AWS Partner Network if you haven't already. Here is the remaining transcript formatted for better readability:

So hopefully, uh this was valuable for you.

Um we had a very short time so I tried to cover some key things that we see in our engagement with customers, but happy to kind of stay here and have a chat or address any questions, if you have some.

Um feel free to take the survey and just invest a minute to uh share your feedback.

Happy to hear your feedback.

And thank you.

Have a great conference.