About Time Tours: Guiding a Successful SaaS Journey

About Time Tours is a Pacific Northwest startup redefining how the real estate industry plans, organizes, and coordinates home tours between agents and homebuyers. With market expertise but only a general business idea, the company asked us for help developing a SaaS-based solution. We guided them on their SaaS journey from a basic app concept to a scalable production-ready launch using AWS SaaS services and best practices.

As a startup, About Time had already identified key pain points facing both realtors and home buyers for scheduling home tours. For all involved, the existing process was time consuming, cumbersome, and fraught with unnecessary complexity. About Time saw an opportunity to streamline scheduling and communication and capture feedback. The company also wanted to maximize the market opportunity and go to market as quickly as possible.

Building the business case & defining the product vision

Given almost 50% of our professional service engagements are SaaS focused, we have deep experience implementing the SaaS business model for clients. We started with About Time by embarking on a full discovery process, beginning with building a well-defined business case for their solution and outlining their product strategy.

This included evaluating customer pain points, developing user stories, and creating a seamless UX/UI experience. We also conducted a competitive analysis of off-the-shelf solutions to determine what problems they solved, how they solved them, and their challenges. After establishing the business case and product vision, we built a series of wire frames showing the functionality of features and workflow before moving on to mockups of the app.

Aligning the MVS with AWS SaaS best practices

For SaaS clients, defining a Minimum Viable Service (MVS) always poses the greatest challenge. It is also the most critical stage on the SaaS journey where resources are concerned, as you can easily over architect your solution and run up costs. We worked with About Time to decide on the right MVS, knowing they would receive important feedback after going live that would likely change the app in future sprints.

Once we had defined the MVS, the AWS SaaS Enablement Framework provided a clear, thorough process for us to evaluate tenancy, security compliances, and compare cost models against the company’s revenue objectives. We also helped About Time prepare documentation and collateral in support of their efforts to secure investor funding.

From development to launch -Leveraging the Well-Architected Framework

In the next phase, our development efforts followed an agile process with milestones sprint by sprint and continual, transparent communication with About Time’s founders and investors. We used the Well-Architected Framework to ensure we were properly evaluating tradeoffs and applying cost optimization strategies when it came to reliability and security. We also segregated their personally identifiable information (PII) data in a multi-tenant environment to meet security compliances.

In addition, we built their app 100% on serverless so it can scale rapidly as their user traffic increases and utilized a pay as you go model to keep costs per user in line with their profit margin and revenue expectations for sustainability and growth.

For testing, our team conducted performance tests to ensure the app could handle expected traffic and security tests to confirm there were no hacking activities. We also held an informal gameday so that there is support documentation in place in case the app goes down during a live environment. Last, our SLA with the company sets expectations regarding our response time and steps we will take to ensure they are up and running quickly.

At launch, About Time’s final mobile and web app represents a highly scalable SaaS solution capable of growing with market demand without compromising on security and cost. Our next steps include capturing feedback and optimizing features and workflows to keep customers happy and satisfied with their solution.

Working with the Effectual team to refine our MVS gave us an objective view of how to align our revenue goals with the right cost model so we could take an informed approach to choosing the best SaaS strategy. As we scale, we know we can meet our business objectives and deliver a high-quality customer experience.

Chris Mergenthaler, Co-Founder