How to Choose the Right Tech Partner for Custom SaaS Development

When developing a SaaS platform of your own, choosing the right Tech Partner might be quite an issue: How do you know they’re a good match to deliver your MVP? How to prevent intellectual property issues? How do you know that they have sufficient technical knowledge? Are they setting a fair price? These and many more concerns may come up.

Generally, building an in-house team to build a SaaS application is beneficial in terms of communication, level of control, and dedication. However, the downsides like high fixed costs (salary, office maintenance, probably one-time costs for supplying the necessary equipment) and limited skill sets are pretty significant as well.

Outsourcing SaaS Solutions Development

On the other hand, looking for a temporary Tech Partner to build such cloud-based software can also be highly beneficial but has certain risks to it. One of the main advantages is significant cost reduction — 70% of companies say that this advantage is the main reason they choose SaaS development outsourcing.

However, it surely isn't the only aspect you should take into account when outsourcing your SaaS project:

The greatest advantages of SaaS development outsourcing include lower costs (especially, in the long run), widely experienced developers, and flexibility in terms of contracts. However, thinking out your contracts to make sure that you get the code rights and structuring your communications so you’re aware of everything that's going on with your project is a must.

Outsourcing vs In-House Development: Use Cases

We definitely haven’t mentioned every single benefit and downside of either SaaS development option; the list goes on due to dozens of other aspects like additional accounting costs for in-house development and issues with providing post-development maintenance when outsourcing the project.

Additionally, these are the general aspects that are applicable to pretty much most of the use cases but surely, your specific case might be somewhat different and require a deeper analysis to make sure that one option is more suitable than the other.

What can also happen is that neither of the options will indeed be the better one, in which case it can be a matter of cost optimization or your personal preferences.

However, there are definitely certain use cases when outsourcing will most likely be more beneficial than in–house development, and vice versa. Let’s take a look.

To avoid such issues, it’s important to:

• have a detailed partnership contract;
• respect each other no matter what and build up streamlined communication channels to address any issues;
• choose your Tech Partners wisely and ask for references.

In case you didn’t pay attention to this aspect and you’re currently having problems with getting access to the repository, feel free to talk about it to your new (potential) Tech Partners.

Otherwise, the new development team will have to work on the project from scratch, which will surely increase your expenses, as well as the development time.

Even though most contracts include the client being the owner of the code, it’s best to double check when signing yours.

# 2: Documentation & Onboarding

Another important matter to take care of is technical and business documentation. The technical part may include:

• A description of the project.
• The design documents.
• The coding standards.
• The testing standards & tasks.
• End-user documentation.
• Instructions for maintenance, installation, and usage, etc.

As for the business part, that may include your budgeting plans, ownership rights, crowdfunding documents, etc.

Long story short, all documentation should be well-structured and include every piece of information that’s related to the project. It’ll help your new Tech Partners understand the previous development process better, start the actual development much faster, and provide you with better results.

What might also happen is that the new company offers you to implement significant changes or start the project anew. That could be due to poorly written code that will cause more problems if left unchanged or a lack of information to continue that development from where it stopped.

It’s quite a common practice so we’d recommend taking your Tech Partner’s advice into account. Just make sure that their argumentation is credible and makes sense to you as a business owner as well.

# 3: Address the Problem

Last but not least, we wouldn’t recommend hiding the reason why you’re looking for a new tech partner from the potential new ones. On the contrary, it’s better to tell the whole truth so that they can get a better understanding of what it is you’re looking for. It can also help them avoid making the same mistakes.

All in all, it’s generally best to take a possible development team change into account from the very beginning so as not to trap yourself into a “no-win” position. So, even if you won’t have to change the Tech Partner, you’ll be fully prepared to make this process as painless and smooth as possible just in case.

However, to know how to do it all, it’s important to have an “insider” with technical knowledge on your team. That person could be a Chief Technical Officer who can talk you through all the technical peculiarities with potential partners and be your trusted person.

Taking over SaaS App Development: Our Expertise

We at Stormotion have taken over some projects that were started by other teams to complete the development. Generally, there are three options here: a complete rewriting of the code, a refactoring (occasional improvement), or a combination of these two methods.

One of the products we took over had some problems with the library versions that the previous team used to set up CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) tools. Namely, the platform administrators announced that these library versions wouldn’t be supported for a long time. This is why the team should’ve updated the libraries on time.

Unfortunately, they overlooked and deployed the code without updating the library versions. The consequence was that we weren’t able to update the application. After local improvements didn’t help, we realized that the platform simply stopped supporting these versions at all. In the end, we had to completely rewrite the CI/CD processes.

If you’re interested in reading a bit more about this and some other similar cases, we have them written in our article on handling technical debt:

More specifically, outsourcing a CTO can be beneficial in many ways:

To successfully outsource the CTO position for your SaaS development, you should take the following steps:

1. Think about the responsibilities you’d like your CTO to take over.
2. Define the sources where you’ll look for them. That can be Linkedin, CTO-as-a-Service companies, your personal industry connections, or a trusted development agency.
3. Make a list of candidates and think about the questions you’ll want to ask them. Here are a couple of examples: Have you ever delivered similar Projects?, How can your experience be useful to our Startup?, What are your honest expectations from working at the company?
4. Set up streamlined and trustworthy communication. As for digital sources, you can use Slack, Skype, Trello, Notion, Hangouts, or any other Software of your choice. Just make sure it’s something that’s accessible from any device and preferably free.

In case you feel like it’s something you might benefit from but still need more information on the topic, we have an article dedicated to CTO Outsourcing:

# 1: The Initial Call

This step implies getting to the client’s business goal, their challenges, expectations, the desired SaaS model, and what generally led them to us. This is also an opportunity to find out about any specific requirements like API integrations, IoT/BLE devices, Machine Learning tools, etc.

At this point in time, we think about what initial solution we can offer (and if we can offer one at all). What we do for that matter is go through every aspect of SaaS application development that might be important for the client at the moment — should it be a complete rewriting of an existing product, a new product, mobile or SaaS web application, a native or a cross-platform, do they need an MVP, what will the SaaS architecture look like?

As for the client, they often ask about our experience with previous clients, industry-related experience, our expertise in specific frameworks, our cost estimate (which is rough at this stage though), and the understanding of whether we’d like to work on the project in the first place.

Your potential Tech Partner might also ask you about your resources for funding the SaaS product development (i.e. investors, crowdfunding campaigns, governmental grants, etc.).

# 2: Estimate & Further Research

Next, clients normally ask us for a more accurate answer to “How much will the development cost?” and a more accurate time estimation to get a better picture of how they can manage their available resources. We, then, try to adjust the development to the client’s needs by offering solutions that can help reduce the costs of the development and the time needed for it.

At this stage, we also research the client’s SaaS platform deeper to see what gaps we have in terms of understanding the client’s needs and our ability to satisfy them. All of that leads us to the Discovery Stage.

# 3: Signing a Contract & The Discovery Stage

We sign a contract and an NDA, after which we immediately start working on the discovery stage of the app development. The end goal of this stage is getting the full picture of what a client needs and talking about the SaaS deployment model. In most cases, it includes a wireframe, implementing a new API (or other technology stack), a more detailed estimate of the SaaS development costs, etc.

If you’d like to learn more about signing an NDA, feel free to follow the link to our article dedicated to this topic: