Technology

The SaaS Handbook: Our first SaaS Product

SaaS has now become one of the fastest-growing in the industry. According to MarketWatch, by 2024, SaaS is expected to reach a $185.8 billion market size. As an innovative software development company, DataHouse Asia eagerly shares our insights into the process and challenges of building a software-as-a-service. Meet the CTO / Technical Architect of DataHouse Asia, Trinh Dang, to uncover how all the main pieces came together when our first SaaS called LumiSight, launched.

What is LumiSight?

LumiSight is a product created by the joint effort between DataHouse Asia and DataHouse US during the COVID 19 Pandemic consists of three different types of platforms called LumiSight Workplace, LumiSight Campus, and LumiSight Travel. Its goal is to keep our community safe and healthy.

As the platform provided, when a person visits a place, our platform will detect whether that person is healthy or potentially has the COVID 19 and inform the COVID 19 authorized person in that place.

The project was started in 2020 and even now, as we enter 2021, the pandemic still ravages a large part of the world.

When we first started, we knew that this platform needed to have the ability to serve different types of users (students, teachers, parents, workers, travelers), in different places (campus, workplace, and airport) for different purposes. Even though the clients we target want similar things like tracking the status of their communities, they still have different organizational requirements. For example, the campus wants the result to send to the campus admin, but for the workplace, employees’ health status will be sent directly to their manager. If we begin with the SaaS too early, the significant change that we will fail to fulfill all of them also we did not know where to start with core features.

We decided to Test the market!

  • Initially, instead of building one Saas platform, we built a separate product for each type of organization in order to understand what they need and have in common. Thanks to our Client Relationship Team, we got feedback from thousands of users in different areas like campuses, banks and airports. We have been working very hard due to the pressure of the timeline and each client’s demands.
  • We expect this because it is in the original plan and once we commit, we do everything we can to make it work. It takes us three months to build a table of features needed and see how the features cross each other – we call them greenfield features.
  • When we have 90% greenfield, we start bringing all the platforms into one and create a Saas product. The result is less costly for the client and the standard system brings more benefits.

Data privacy is a big issue.

Before convincing the client to move to a SaaS product, we also solve the “data privacy” problem. This is the top priority for us when making the SaaS. We run much testing to ensure that the data is safe, the system is stable, and cannot be broken in any situation up to 2 million users. The system relies on various solutions to ensure the highest level of data privacy of tenants, though they are physically located in the same location. The primary approach is to provide an after-logged-in token with the tenant information that allows the user to only access the tenant data provided with that token. The system respects the so-called tenant token at different levels, from the front-end application to the backend application and the database, to ensure that a defect that occurred at a single level does not break the data privacy of the whole system. Physically, we keep all hardware base on the US and on the Cloud. All LumiSight platform has more than nearly 500,000 users now, and it is the effort from the whole Product Team, Development Team, Operation Team, Support Team and our Client Relationship Team.

Do not expect that everything will be well-organized. It is not realistic when you were developing a product.

First, we have to change the mindset: We have to manage the client’s expectations and users. Please get familiar with things that regularly changed; sometimes, we have to throw away what we have done. What we think is right may not right because we are not the end-users. People have to be flexible to adapt to the new way of working. However, in return, “running a product” is in our hands allows us to use the technologies that we familiar with most, even try the new technologies. As long as you still manage risks, there are many chances to grow. I want to give the credits to the team’s effort, the flexibility that the project manager brings to the team, and the customer relationship team who put all of their effort to convince clients on product features and make them happy. Also, the confidence in technical skills with a fair process and risk management contributes to our progress.

What will be 2021 of LumiSight looks like?

The year 2021 has begun, but the Pandemic continues to ravage a large part of the world. Even though we may be oblivious to it here in Vietnam, the number of infections keeps rising exponentially in many parts of the world.

The world has the vaccine, but we not sure how it can be ready for the global citizen. We want LumiSight to be apart of that, to support vaccination, COVID 19 testing, and all the things related to healthcare and make EVERYTHING CONNECTED.

Furthermore, of course, we aim to bring our product to the bigger market so far to the whole US state. Be a part of this to make the world a better place through Technologies.

If you are looking out for the SaaS development and consulting firm, contact us today to get on a free 30-minute consultation call with our tech team to know the feasibility of your project idea.

Start a conversation: aloha@datahouse.com

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