Why we're here: helping SaaS businesses get to market faster and stay competitive
Introducing Spaceship, an advanced continuous delivery platform that keeps your applications running smoothly
The software space is largely a winner-take-all industry. Ultimately, there tends to be an emergent market leader that owns the lion’s share of users in a given space and can retain that status for quite a while.
But this status quo is a problem. Competition is good.
That’s because competition in the software industry drives companies to push the envelope on capabilities and innovate better products for their customers. These innovations often create faster, easier to use software that delights users. And with software eating the world, wouldn’t it be nice if it all worked a bit better?
Something has to change to empower healthier competition.
The software delivery barrier to entry for SaaS businesses is too high
There’s no shortage of ideas for new applications to remove friction from everyday experiences. However, many founders have difficulty fully executing on these ideas and building a solid foundation to grow them over time.
In fact, one of the primary reasons that competition within the software space is lower than it ought to be is the high barrier to entry many new businesses face in taking their products live and iterating on them according to customer feedback.
Two of the biggest challenges many SaaS startups face are building the right product and getting their product in front of customers. We have seen time and time again the way to build the right product is to put it in the hands of users and then build what they need. Continuous delivery is a methodology for making your company’s default behavior to put the software in front of customers by pushing software updates to your product as soon as they are developed and tested.
Unfortunately, many teams devote too much effort to getting their software online to put it in front of customers. The time spent building out common SaaS features – authentication, user management, billing, test suites and delivery pipelines – could be better spent building what drives the business. This can hinder teams from building software that has the potential to be extremely powerful in the hands of customers.
How Spaceship lowers the barrier to entry for SaaS businesses
At Spaceship, we know this challenge all too well. We’re founders ourselves who have gone through this process at several SaaS startups. We’ve experienced the challenges firsthand and successfully worked through them. Spaceship is designed to help other startups implement the simple premise that frequently putting their software out in front of customers will improve their product and their businesses.
Our philosophy: software delivery needs a mind shift
The first step to lowering the barrier to entry for SaaS startups is to embrace a mind shift when it comes to software delivery. It’s human nature to want to wait until something is complete to get feedback on it, but this approach doesn’t work in today’s fast-paced software industry where even the most advanced solutions are always in a state of flux.
Instead, teams must embrace a continuous delivery model that allows them to get a minimum viable product (MVP) to market as soon as it’s ready. This mind shift results in three critical benefits:
- Faster feedback: Getting software in front of customers for real user feedback is essential for ensuring proper product-market fit and delivering the most impactful solutions. However, the only way to do this with any kind of regularity, particularly for early stage companies, is to deliver new changes as soon as they’re ready. We must abandon our fragile egos, adopt a resilient mindset and be willing to ship more often.
- More opportunities to get things right: Packaging multiple changes together for a giant release leaves a lot resting on that moment. It requires choosing the proper inflection point for a release and creates a single opportunity to get things right. In contrast, delivering small changes frequently lowers the stakes each time and allows for more opportunities to get those things right. It also makes it far easier to pull back on something that doesn’t go as planned.
- More cost and time efficient testing: Big releases that package multiple changes together can easily become a testing beast. They include numerous areas that require testing, which splits focus, and they necessitate significant regression testing to ensure no bugs are introduced. Releasing smaller updates as soon as they’re ready helps make testing more cost and time efficient by allowing testers to focus on very specific areas that are changing. This results in higher quality software with fewer bugs.
The impact of this mind shift can’t be understated. The best example of its impact is Amazon. One of the biggest differences between Amazon and its competitors is that Amazon ships new code by the second while its competitors ship new code by the quarter. In general, research reveals that the best performing companies ship new code far more frequently than lower performing companies.
What Spaceship does differently: the first of its kind delivery platform
We’ve distilled this philosophy into Spaceship, the first of its kind delivery platform. Three things, in particular, make Spaceship so unique:
- Our focus on continuous delivery helps get products live faster and enriches the ongoing development process: With Spaceship, the default position is to release new code as soon as it’s ready, with the option to hide certain features as needed. This approach removes the need for bespoke software delivery pipelines that prevent teams from getting their code online. It also makes it easier to release regular updates over time as the company grows and to continue to reap benefits around faster feedback, more opportunities to get things right and more cost and time efficient testing.
- Our language and cloud agnostic approach allows Spaceship to grow with your team: Most of the software delivery solutions available today are directed at two very different and very specific segments of the market: Scrappy startups and deep-pocketed enterprises. This dichotomy forces teams to rebuild their entire processes and infrastructure when they reach a certain size. Spaceship allows teams to deliver with their language of choice (including Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Python, Java, Scala, PHP and Go) on their cloud of choice, which means we can grow with your team. Use whatever language and infrastructure your team knows best.
- We sell our process, not the infrastructure: We want to help your teams ship daily updates that delight your users. Our platform will support all of the major cloud providers and empower you to use all of their cost saving features. You can keep focusing on what your customers need and enjoy an effortless delivery process powered by cost-effective infrastructure.
The time to act is now: talk to Spaceship today
We believe it should be far easier than it is to launch a software company. If you have a development team that can build solutions, a strong market fit and an eager customer base, you should be able to bring your product to market and grow it to a substantial size. Spaceship is designed to remove the challenges within the delivery process that prevent many software companies from doing just that.
Tim and I love talking with fellow founders. We are interested in helping your company succeed. Interested in learning more about how we can help you remove delivery obstacles and more easily incorporate real user feedback into product development? Contact us at founders@spaceship.run to set up time to talk about your business. We can help identify any challenges and rectify them early on to save you time and money.