BESPOKE TO SAAS
Background
We had built an expertise over many years and our craft was quite literally amongst the best in the world. This was great and we built a very profitable business upon this. However, it did not deliver a long-term future as no matter how good your craft is, the demands of the marketplace change and requirements for quicker, cheaper, more flexible start to dominate a clients thinking.
Anyone who has built a market leader position is always there to be shot at. They become the benchmark by which others judge themselves and the gap closes very quickly. Being overly focused on your current craft becomes a race to the bottom. Whilst you are fettling your craft, others are overtaking you.
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Action
To broaden our offering, to take advantage of our expertise and benefit from the growing demand for content, we started to scope out a Visualisation Platform built around Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. We were already building bespoke experiences using UE4 and already had a highly skills Software Engineering team who were building tools for clients on a project by project basis. The step we needed to make was to combine the two and build a platform to sell as a SaaS solution.
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We did our competitive research to understand what was already in the marketplace and identified not only what our solution needed to include, but most importantly, what our USP should be. We looked at recent briefs we had received and at pitches that we had been on.
This helped us understand what client thought they wanted and so we could see how to go beyond their current requirements. This enabled us to ensure that we were as future proofed as possible. We were then able to write a Product Description Document and build a development road map. To help us deliver the brief we hired a Product Manager (quite different to a Project Manager).
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We had to ring fenced the Product Team away from paying projects. This is harder than it sounds as we had existing client tools that needed maintaining and pitches that needed a technical architecting. So, rather then ring fencing the complete team, we split out a core team and allowed other resource to move back and forth between client projects and the platform build.
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Results
We are still in the early stages on the work with only a handful of sprints completed but we have a working prototype and the Visualisation Platform has become a key part of our discussions with both current and potential clients.