BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud computing seems to be catching up everywhere. Thanks to the early success of hosted email, CRM, web conference meetings, project management, etc, we now see many entrepreneurs with fabulous ideas in technology, business change and social services, who plan to leverage the cloud or service their customers or make that extra competitive difference to change our lives.

Thankfully, there is no dearth of inspirational and useful information too. Whether you are a beginner or an expert, you can easily find fascinating thoughts, dos and donts, reviews, hands-on guides, free logins, blog reviews, reports and analysis available on the webabout how companies should use the cloud in general and others on the areas of how best to use or launch online services.

The SaaS Venture

My experience from evangelizing for entrepreneurs/customers across the world is filled with many such exciting learnings. Truth is simple and here are my simple seven ways to make that big difference ON how you offer and breed early success with your SaaS venture.

While this new on-demand world seems quite unfamiliar to most of you, it is in fact a lot simpler than expected. Think about driving into a large shopping mall, parking your car, getting a movie ticket and paying for what you use by the quantity or on usage basissimple! This is a new method of delivering automation fit for your taste and paid as per use.

Customers love it, they get the best without being discriminated, infrastructure companies make more from their one-time investments month after month and entrepreneurs get to innovate all the time for every buck they earn more. Superior standards of service drive profitability and not just availability. This brings me to the first and most important point, I would like to address to everyone heading this way:

Small is big, business is simple: Focus on customer needs and not segments or pricing. The segmentation holds true when it comes to certain types of businesses as you evolve, but it does no good to your on-demand value driven SaaS when you are booting up. Every customer is a king and you must build relationships and not just contracts to become successful. Without them, none of us will exist. Its all about service when it comes to your SaaS business and your tiniest account will generate nothing less than $1,000 in less than two years time.

Focus on farming, stickiness is the key to success: There is an old saying in golf, your drive shot only counts for 37% and the rest 63% is left for your other strokes to par the hole. Getting a customer who has a need might be the most important task of your sales team, but in the on-demand software as a service world it is not so much about sales. Customers demand greater service, quicker response time, they want you to listen and factor their needs. If you want to succeed as a service provider, your business must be equipped to learn, adapt, release and get ready once again to reiterate as a continuous exercise.

Precipitate or perish: When you are running a small margin, horizontal SaaS application such as tax, audit, CRM or even a campaign management toola direct marketing and sales process is more preferable than a margin split channels play. But that does not mean you dont precipitate and build it all by yourself. From IP rich business solutions to generic applications, one must precipitatemix thoughts/share web services, opportunities and learn to cook half baked partial solutions into multiple offerings to drive higher solid numbers. Committing to building a shared ecosystem for higher sales, better services and towards creating newer offerings along with partners are a key recipe for success. Remember you are in this business of committed monthly recurring revenue (CMRR) and not license sales and it will take ages to hit a higher scale without multiple channels play.