Starting a SaaS (Software as a Service) business on your own can be a daunting task. As a solopreneur or as a member of a small team, you'll need to wear many hats and acquire a broad set of skills.

This checklist covers the key skills you'll need to build a SaaS business. It's a lot, I know. You don't need to master any of those, though. You just need to be good enough (hello, Pareto!).

As this blog grows, I'll update this checklist to link to posts that can help you learn about each of these categories.

Product skills

The most important part of your SaaS business is the product itself. If it's bad, no matter how good you are at the rest, it will not scale.

Here are a few of the essential product skills you need to build a SaaS product from scratch:

Market Research

• User Research: Understanding your target audience, their needs, and pain points
• Competitor Analysis: Analyzing competitors to identify market gaps and opportunities
• Trend Analysis: Keeping up with industry trends to ensure your product remains relevant

Ideation and Conceptualization

• Brainstorming: Generating a wide variety of ideas for potential features or solutions
• Feasibility Analysis: Assessing the technical and financial feasibility of different ideas
• Prototyping: Creating a basic version of your product to test and validate your ideas - this could be using no code tools patched together or even manual processes

UI/UX Design

• User-Centered Design: Ensuring that user needs are at the forefront of all design and development decisions
• Wireframing and Mockups: Creating preliminary designs of your product’s user interface
• User Flow Mapping: Understanding and designing the journey that users will take through your product
• UI: Creating beautiful and intuitive user interfaces using UI design principles

User Testing and Iteration

• Beta Testing: Releasing your product to a limited audience to gather feedback and identify issues.
• User Feedback Analysis: Analyzing feedback from users to make informed improvements to your product.

Technical skills

Unless you want to go the no-code route, you need to be a full-stack Engineer.

Even if you want to build your SaaS product using a no-code platform, you'll need some technical skills to go beyond the basics. Indeed, even the most intuitive no-code platforms have their limits. To truly tailor your SaaS product to your users' needs, a solid understanding of the underlying technical principles is indispensable: a strong foundation in algorithmics and general software architecture is a minimum.

And if you want to build a fully fledged SaaS product, here are the technical skills you need:

Front-end Development

• HTML/CSS: The basics - for creating and styling your web app
• JavaScript/TypeScript: A must for modern web frameworks/libraries such as Vue, React, or Svelte
• Responsive Web Design: Understanding the basics to ensure your application works well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes

Back-end Development

• Server-Side Scripting: Even though a lot can now happen in the front-end, you will always need some kind of back-end - you can use languages like Python, Ruby, or Node.js
• Database Management: There's a 98% chance you will need a database at some point, so you should be comfortable with self-hosted or managed databases, either relational (SQL) or no-SQL depending on your needs
• API Development: Building RESTful or GraphQL APIs for your front-end to interact with

DevOps

• Version Control/Git: For tracking changes, collaborating with other developers (if applicable), and maintaining the integrity of your codebase
• Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Automated pipelines to test and deploy your code - this is a must if you want to ship fast!
• Cloud Services: Learning how to leverage AWS, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure for hosting your application, databases, etc.

Security

• Data Encryption: Ensuring sensitive data is stored and transferred securely.
• Authentication and Authorization: Securely managing user access and protecting user accounts

Quality Assurance and Testing

• Unit Testing: Testing individual parts of your application for correctness
• Integration Testing: Ensuring all parts of your application work together as expected
• End-to-End Testing: Testing your application as a whole, often using automated tools

Growth skills

Once you've got a 1st version of your SaaS product, it's time to introduce it to the world!

And then, it never stops. You constantly need to find new ways to scale and grow your business, and that's where these growth skills come in handy:

Launch and Go-to-Market

• Launch Planning: Creating a plan for your product’s launch, including marketing efforts
• Pricing Strategy: Determining how much your product will cost and how you will structure pricing
• Distribution Channels: Identifying and setting up the channels through which your product will be sold
• Branding: Defining a strong brand for your customers to remember you

Selling and Scaling

• Prospection: Identifying relevant potential customers to sell to
• Marketing strategies: Learning about SEO for organic search ranking and/or paid advertising (Google Ads, Facebook Ads) if relevant for your business
• Inbound sales: Creating a strategy to let customers come to you - this could be through content creation, events, or anything else
• Outbound sales: Reaching out to prospects to let them know about your product - this could be through cold emailing, cold calling, or even knocking on doors
• Retention strategies: Techniques to keep users engaged and reduce churn

Analytics and Data-Driven Decision Making

• Performance Metrics: Identifying and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) for your product
• User Behavior Analysis: Using analytics tools to understand how users interact with your product
• Data-Driven Iteration: Making improvements and adjustments to your product based on data and user feedback

Customer Support and Success

• Support Systems: Setting up systems to help users when they have issues or questions.
• User Education: Creating resources like guides, FAQs, and tutorials to help users get the most out of your product
• Customer Success: Proactively helping users achieve their goals with your product to increase satisfaction and retention

Soft skills

On top of the very specific skills you need to build a SaaS business from scratch, there are also a bunch of more general skills that are mandatory to be an entrepreneur.

They are the glue that holds together the multifaceted aspects of building and running a successful SaaS business:

Problem-Solving

• Analytical Thinking: The ability to dissect a problem into its component parts and understand the underlying issues
• Creativity: Generating innovative solutions and thinking outside the box to overcome obstacles
• Decision Making: Assessing different solutions to identify the most effective path forward, even under pressure

Time Management

• Prioritization: Distinguishing between urgent and important tasks, and addressing them in an efficient order
• Delegation: Recognizing tasks that can be delegated to others, freeing up time for high-priority activities
• Scheduling: Planning and allocating time for different tasks, ensuring that key objectives are met

Communication

• Active Listening: Fully concentrating, understanding, responding, and then remembering what is being said
• Clarity and Conciseness: Conveying clear messages in as few words as possible without sacrificing the other elements of good communication
• Presenting: Being able to present (visually or orally) your ideas in their best light
• Persuasion: Effectively convincing others to understand and consider your point of view or your product's value proposition

Determination

• Resilience: Bouncing back from setbacks and working through challenges
• Motivation: Staying motivated through the entire journey
• Focus: Being able to focus on the most important things without getting distracted

Yes, it's a long list. But being a saaspreneur is not for the faint of heart!

I'm sure there's already a good part of this list that you're already comfortable with, and many things in there you are probably better at than you think.

The key thing is being committed to continuous learning - most of these things sound harder than they actually are.