SaaS for Developers

Sam Ramji is an odd duck. He is full of curiosity, insights and ideas. He is also is the Chief Strategy Officer of Datastax.  In the most wide-ranging conversation I've ever recorded, we discussed the most interesting ideas in computing. From the 1980s - all the way to 2032.   Along the way you'll learn how to craft a career as an odd duck with talent for strategy, how to transform...

In a recent blog post ( https://docs.thenile.dev/blog/saas-is... ) we gave a long list of reasons why building a control plane for Infra SaaS is tricky. In this video, we walk through an example - from requirements to design, and illustrate why things are always harder than they first appear.

Building Infra SaaS? Love control planes? - Ping me by email: gwen@thenile.dev or join the community and continue the conversation https://launchpass.com/all-about-saas .   Data Products are trendy, and all tech trends lead to a mess around what it even means and how different products fit in. This is a "highlights" version of my YOW! Data 2022 keynote. I included some of the key insights her...

Reverse ETL is a bit of a buzzword these days. But why?   In this video Gwen Shapira discusses the new capabilities that reverse ETL introduces to businesses, and especially B2B SaaS with product-lead growth strategy. She also discusses why reverse ETL is more challenging to implement than you may imagine and why stream processing platforms may  be a key part of solving these challenges....

Growth teams are cross-functional teams that have a clear goal - help customers get value from a SaaS service by improving the product itself. Great growth teams are metrics-driven and obsessed with the user experience. They optimize to experiment, learn and iterate fast.    In this episode, I interviewed Laura Brouckman, the engineering leader of Confluent Cloud's growth team - about th...

The best cloud experience is a serverless experience. Billing is usage-based, and services scale automatically based on demand - reducing costs and the operational burden for most use-cases. Building a great user experience for serverless platforms is not easy - you need a great architecture and a bit of magic to pull it off.    Tune in for API design tips, architecture patterns, and Kub...

Companies that take existing software and manage it in the cloud have the opportunity to rethink their architecture and use cloud services appropriately. The resulting system is often cheaper, simpler, more elastic, and more manageable.    Neha Pawar, a founding engineer at StarTree Data and a PMC member of Apache Pinot, recently published a blog post about her experiments with tiered st...

Can you use your product while you are building it? What is one architecture trick that makes serverless easy? How do you build a call center in two weeks? And what is the right number of managers for a team? I invited Yoav Abrahami, chief architect at Wix, to tell the SaaS Developer Community how Wix uses Wix products to build other Wix products. We've ended up covering a lot of great topics: How...

Puneet and Lior from Amberflo share the story how and why AWS decided to price S3 with usage based billing. We also learn what is metering, how it is different from monitoring and why it matters. And finally, practical tips on how to implement metering and apply a usage-based pricing strategy.

Migrating from a simple, working, homegrown orchestration to Kubernetes. Why would you do that? And what will you learn once you do?  Gianluca, now engineer at Aerosearch, shares stories from his time at InfluxDB, when they migrated their cloud to K8s. He tells the story, and shares important advice on learning, advocating, making tradeoffs and even the secret to hiring great engineers. &nbsp...

Users of Infrastructure SaaS expect to see metrics and receive notifications about the state of the system. But what metrics to expose? Who do you notify? And how to avoid oversharing?  This videos are packed with useful tips by Dustin Cote, product manager at Confluent who spent 3 years figuring this out. We start by talking about metrics, and then switch to notifications at around minute 18...

We know quality when we see it, but what makes a product truly great? And what does it take to build a great product?   In this video, Gwen shares her view of what makes products great, gives examples of great products, and shares some tips on how to build one.    Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https://saas-community.github.io/  Quality links:  Zen a...

You log in to Confluent Cloud, you click on "create cluster" and soon after the cluster shows up, the UI shows a nice message, an email arrives in your mailbox with details about the cluster and the usage of the cluster shows up in your next credit card statement. It is a nice and smooth experience.   In this video, our guest, Ram Subramanian, former VP of Eng at Confluent discussed what actu...

API Economy is booming and provides many services that make SaaS development easier. Adding great public APIs to your product is also easier than ever.    In this episode, Gwen Shapira, usually the host of the channel, shared everything she learned about APIs, API Economy, and building great public APIs in the last week.    Interested in more SaaS content? Join our Slack: https...

Modern SaaS applications increasingly turn to consumption-based billing - a payment scheme in which customers pay based on resources used. This flexible billing is very popular with users but can be challenging to implement. Metronome CTO, Scott Woody, joined us to explain why usage-based billing is so crucial for the SaaS business model - and what it takes to get it right.   Highlights inclu...

In the three years spanning 2018–2020, at least thirty-nine SaaS companies filed for IPO. These companies are the top 1% of SaaS companies. In this talk, I will cover the common GTM, pricing, and packaging strategies used by these companies, emphasizing developer-focused SaaS IPOs. If you are an entrepreneur or an executive at an early-stage startup (seed - Series B), this talk will be valuable fo...

Customer expectations in the SaaS world are constantly changing - and the bar for "great customer experience" is getting higher. Eva Nahari, from DNX Ventures, shares her view on what the best SaaS companies do and what everyone else is missing.